Estimation of SAP HANA Replication Network Requirements in Optimized Way

The network connection between the primary and the secondary system impacts the overall performance of the SAP HANA systems if not configured correctly .For SAP HANA system replication it is critical that the network throughput (or bandwidth) and network latency requirement are sufficient to fulfill the optimal network requirements.

In this article, I am going to explain – How to measure optimal network bandwidth requirement for HANA replication setup and other important considerations for network throughput and latency.

Let’s take an example of 3-tier multi-target replication setup.

From DC1–> DC2 {SYNC | logreplay | delta_datashipping}

Using HANA DB BLOB fields to store/retrieve File Attachments using Node.JS and SAPUI5

Introduction

When using Node.JS in SAP BTP Cloud Foundry, you may have the need to store/retrieve file attachments in your NodeJS Application (backend) and SAPUI5 (front end). There are several approaches, of these the main would be:

◉ File System

◉ File Storage

◉ SAP HANA Database Storage, as BLOB (Binary Large Objects)

SAP Digital Vehicle Hub: Integration with SAP S/4HANA Vehicle Management System for Vehicle Master Data

This blog covers the scope of vehicle master data integration and how it works together with vehicle integration delivered by earlier releases of SAP Digital Vehicle Hub.

Pre-requisites:

◉ S/4HANA 2020 FPS 01 or higher

◉ SAP Digital Vehicle Hub 1.1 or higher

◉ SAP Cloud Platform Integration with JMS queue

Housekeeping of HDI containers in developer workspaces

Introduction

When ever a developer is doing local build of a db module in WebIDE for HANA, it creates an HANA service instance that name looks like <USER><GUID><MODULE_NAME>.

You can see those HANA service instances via XSA Cockpit

Flexible Billing document numbering – State wise number range (without use of FIORI App)

This blog is to handle the requirement in SAP S/4 HANA 2020 On-Premise version for different billing document number prefixes based on the state (region) and the different number range for the billing type as different billing types are used. Few billing types are GST relevant, few are VAT relevant, and others.

Solution scope based on the new concept of SAP S/4 HANA 2020 – Flexible billing document numbering.

Prefix should be defined based on the region (state) and different number range intervals will be used for configured billing types. If flexible document numbering is not configured for any particular billing type then it will pick the standard number range interval assigned to that billing type.

SAP RETAIL Allocation Rule based on Material Group

The following function demonstration is based on the system of SAP S/4 HANA 1909, which activates is-retain.

1. There are below articles of material group 101010101.

Running SAP HANA on Azure Spot Instances

What is SAP HANA?

SAP HANA is an in-memory database and application development platform used to process large volumes of information in real-time.

SAP HANA lets data analysts query sizable volumes of information in real-time. HANA’s in-memory computing means no time is wasted loading or writing data to disk, allowing analysts to perform queries much faster. 

Launch of Enhanced Financial Data Quality Check in SAP Readiness Check for SAP S/4HANA

The Financial Data Quality check within SAP Readiness Check has been enhanced and extended to provide further insights. This new version of the Financial Data Quality check includes the ability to analyze asset accounting data, in addition to general ledger data. As with general ledger data inconsistencies, it is critical to identify and resolve asset account inconsistencies before or as part of a conversion project to SAP S/4HANA.

In addition to the support of an additional area of finance, the Financial Data Quality check tile and detail pages have been enhanced to clearly display the findings from the analysis. Grouped by finance area, the detail view includes:

Manage XS Advanced via SQL

Introduction

The main tools for XS Advanced administration are the XS Command-Line Interface and the XS Advanced Cockpit.

For both of them, the prerequisites are to have an XS Advanced user with required role collections and also to be member of the organization/space you want to manage.

If you are using XSA only in the context of Data modeling (HDI Advanced Model) via WebIDE for HANA, you may face the situation that developers have XS Advanced users in development system but only basic database users in quality and production systems. For security reason, you may not want to provide them access to XSA Cockpit in Quality and Production systems.

RISE with SAP: ‘Defence in Depth’ Security Architecture with SAP S/4HANA Cloud (Public Cloud)

Introduction

The SAP S/4HANA Cloud is at the core of “Rise with SAP” offering. For a customer, it holds mission critical data used to implement business processes and data analytics. It is deployed in a public cloud as SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) offering. SAP S/4HANA Cloud is a “Multi-Tenanted” platform, delivering highly standardized content for various lines of business in an industry and for varieties industries. As digital transformation sweeps the IT industry, embracing cloud technologies is inevitable. In this context, cloud security is imperative to this transformation.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud runs on public cloud such as Google Cloud Platform (GCP), MS Azure and SAP Converged Data Centres around the world. SAP uses hyperscale providers who offer “Infrastructure-as -a-Service for greater flexibility, scalability, and security for the provisioning of cloud infrastructure. SAP S/4HANA Cloud tenant subscription includes provisioning of SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) services such as Identity Authentication Services, Identity Provisioning Service, SAP Analytics Cloud, and In-App & Side by side via BTP / Extensibility Framework.

SHAP-explained models with Automated Predictive (APL)

To address classification and regression machine learning scenarios, APL uses the Gradient Boosting technique. As for explaining what the predictive model does, APL relies on the SHAP framework (SHapley Additive exPlanations).

In this blog we will see how to extract and visualize SHAP values to obtain a:

1. Global explanation from the APL trained model.

2. Local explanation regarding an individual prediction.

Let’s go through a classification example: Detection of Car Insurance Fraud.

Understanding Attributes ,Text, Value help in S/4 HANA ABAP CDS views

Introduction: 

This Blog post provide information and understanding on very important features in S4HANA Embedded Analytics which is Text, Attributes, and value help in CDS views.

Overview:

We face multiple requirements in Reports based on CDS views related to text, Attributes and Value help.

SAP Analytics Cloud – Replicating BW Analysis Authorizations into Dimension Read/Write Property

In this blog post, I will be tackling a much more common use case, which is the BW Analysis Authorizations to be replicated into the SAP Analytics Cloud public dimenions’ read and write properties using a HANA calculation view.

Pre-requisites

◉ At least SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 1.

◉ User IDs for each user on SAP Analytics Cloud to be the same as their BW users.

   ◉ If there is a prefix or a suffix included, it can be appended to the code, by concatenating either of them to the final UNAME.

How to create Rate Table in SAP S/4HANA Cloud?

For every transportation services there is a cost involved, we can group these costs for a specific transportation service in a table called rate table.

In the rate table you can define scales, validity and once the rate table is defined you can maintain rates.

In this blog post I will describe how we can set-up a simple rate table in SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

In order to create rate table, you need to login as “transportation_mgr” and go to the app “Manage Rate Tables“.

Explainable forecasting using HANA and APL

This is part 2 in a two-part series of blog posts on large-scale and explainable forecasting using APL. In part 1 I have outlined a way to utilize the APL library for in-database training of a regression model in HANA in order to be used together with an external Node.js inference script.

In this part of the blog post I will dive deeper into built-in functionality to retrieve insights into a trained model which is called the ‘model debrief’.

Explainable AI

Being able to explain the inner workings of a model (also “explainable AI” or “XAI”) is an important topic in applying machine learning in enterprise environments and is recently gaining much attention. The APL regression modeling algorithm uses a gradient boosting tree under the hood which is extremely well suited for this purpose.

SAP & Dell Technologies – Transforming Data at the Edge, Cloud & Core

Organizations understand that, to thrive in the digital economy, they must derive better insights from the data they own — and do it in a more automated, reliable way. The faster this process, the faster the time to insights.

Large-scale forecasting using HANA, APL and Node.js

Background

Last year I became involved in a project for a retailer based in The Netherlands who had finished construction of a new distribution center. This new innovative DC is fully mechanized and is operated with a minimal amount of personnel, which is different from conventional distribution centers where sudden large order spikes are fulfilled by having more staff pick these orders in parallel. The automated nature of the machinery in this new DC means that the order picking process has a fixed capacity and cannot be scaled up easily by adding more personnel on the fly. In order to optimize its capacity, the DC will therefore also be performing tasks during quiet hours.

These tasks are derived from a forecast the client must supply to the DC controlling software. In practice a 7-day’s forecast needs to be provided to the DC on a daily basis.

Linking Latitude and Longitude to Countries with SAP HANA Cloud

The actual solution of the question above is super-easy and comes down to a single select statement using a spatial join. So, the major part of this explanation will be about data import of the following files:

1. We need a dataset with global latitude and longitude data. On Kaggle there is a nice data set with Global Power Plants. This dataset already contains a country column, which we will of course ignore (otherwise the question above does not make much sense). Instead of this, you can also use your own dataset, where the problem statement makes more sense.

New Message Monitors for Integration Experts and Administrators

Let’ start with the Message Monitoring for Integration Experts.

Message Monitoring for Integration Experts

In the Fiori launchpad, select the Message Monitoring for Integration Experts tile below the Message Monitoring space.

Integration of Plant Maintenance(PM) with Extended warehouse management (EWM) in S/4HANA 2021 Release

SAP scores over other ERPs’ on its integration capabilities between its modules / Business processes and applications. SAP’s default warehouse management solution EWM (Extended warehouse management) has strong integration with business processes like Order to cash (O2C), Procure to Pay (P2P), Production and Transportation. However, EWM was lacking in its capability to integrate with Maintenance processes till its S/4HANA 2020 release. This limitation of integration of Plant Maintenance (PM) order with EWM has been eliminated in S/4HANA 2021 release.

A typical process flow diagram for EWM – PM integration with delivery is depicted in below image.

Estimating the costs of SAP HANA Cloud

SAP HANA Cloud offers organizations a lot of flexibility. Flexibility means that the price for SAP HANA Cloud varies according to your needs. Because SAP HANA Cloud is a service inside the SAP Business Technology Platform, it uses the same billing logic, which is based on capacity units. 

That’s why we’ve created an SAP HANA Cloud capacity unit calculator to help organizations make decisions about what they need to make the SAP HANA Cloud instances as robust as necessary. Let’s see how to get your price estimate:

1. To get started, go to the SAP Business Technology Platform Price Calculator.

2. From there, select SAP HANA Cloud as the service you want to estimate.

3. Click on the calculator icon to open the Capacity Unit Estimator.

Enabling Dynamic Fiscal filtering in SAC (BW Live)

At time of writing, SAP Analytics Cloud (Q4, 2021.20) does offer dynamic calendar-based time filtering. This enables users to quickly analyse data for periods such as Current Year, Quarter and Month to Date. The same functionality is also exposed when working with SAP BW Live models containing a 0CALDAY dimension.

The limitation is that for BW Live models, the platform has no awareness of Fiscal / Financial periods. SAC offers no native mechanism to dynamically present common reporting scenarios such as Financial Year to Date, or even just Current Financial Year. All dynamic options Calendar based only.

SAP BW*: Spotlight on HANA Transformations on ODP Sources

This blog post focuses on leveraging this Push-Down concept for ODP DataSources. As ODP is the key source system type for SAP data in BW/4HANA, most customers dealing with conversion projects will have to gain new expertise in this area. Here I would like to share some valuable lesson learned from customer projects.

Let´s assume, an in-place conversion goes roughly through following four phases:

1. The starting point are often legacy data flows, based on S-API interfaces, and maybe even with 3.x objects in combination with the RSA7 delta queue in the source system.

2. The evolution to ODP includes moving to the new Operational Delta Queue as replacement for the RSA7 predecessor.

SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation Content in SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2111 – (Deep Dive)

In this blog, we will expand on the new capabilities with SAP Intelligent RPA latest innovations providing complete cloud experience, simple interactions for business power users and simple to test from browser.

Fast and cost-effective implementation and deployment of cloud studio based bots via pre-defined best practices SAP Intelligent RPA content, enables the Intelligent Enterprise for customers by driving business process improvements.

SAP Intelligent RPA 2.0

7 Best Practices for Creating a High Availability Infrastructure

Cloud computing has revolutionized the way an IT company works in the present age. Without cloud power, many small and large organizations would have massive trouble conducting their functions and serving customers.

The cloud makes all hardware and software resources flexible, accessible, and efficient through its interface and features. But to avail this service productively, it needs to be working at all times.

With increasing demands for cloud computing services, companies rely on them fully to be stable whenever they are needed. Thus, any downtime for applications or services creates issues for the business and its customers. This is where high availability infrastructure comes in.

Top 10 Insights from the openSAP course “A First Step Towards SAP HANA Query Optimization”

I’m hoping that the title starting with ‘A First Step…’ implies that we will be continuing the journey with them with a second more detailed course.

Here are my top 10 interesting insights from the course, I hope this will entice you to go do the course yourselves. Here is the link to the course:

https://open.sap.com/courses/hanasql1

What characterises the HANA SQL Data Warehouse?

Introduction

As known from many articles and publications, SAP offers three solutions for data warehousing.

SAP Data Warehouse Solutions (Source: SAP)

The SAP Business Warehouse (BW) was first published in 1997 and has therefore been a constant figure in the SAP Data Warehouse range for more than two decades. BW / 4 HANA as a HANA-optimized variant integrates the old ABAP world with the new SQL orientation of the SAP HANA platform.

A Step-by-Step Blockchain Creation Tutorial for Beginners

Cryptocurrency trading remains the latest trend in the financial sector. As a digital stepping stone to decentralization, it has piqued people’s interest. The true crypto believers have proliferated over the years despite the skepticism. As such, its global expansion continues amidst the economic downturn. 

In the world of cryptocurrency, blockchain is one of the fundamental components. Blockchain keeps everything intact and organized. To ensure your success in crypto trading, you must know how to create or at least navigate blockchain. Hence, we will discuss the basics of a blockchain and how to create your own from scratch. 

What is Blockchain?

Blockchain is a broad concept in the financial world. In the cryptocurrency market, it is a digital network across independent databases. As such, it enables widespread financial decentralization. In essence, it is simply a digital ledger that accounts for all crypto transactions. According to Coinjournal, its name Blockchain makes sense, it is composed of blocks of codes chained together and arranged chronologically. 

How to assign one Selection screen input field value into another field [ Not input ready] in SAP analytics report [ BW Query] using SAP HANA Exit

Prerequisite

During the development of any SAP analytical report, we may required to access one 

selection screen variable value to be assigned to another selection screen variable.

So that the second variable will bring all the relevant information from the database.

Out of many, there is one scenario where users enter the value one selection screen field in the SAP analytics report. After input same value gets assigned into another selection screen field [ Not input ready]. See the below flow shows how the “ZVAR_WBS_HIER” value gets assigned into the “ZHE_WBS” variable.

HANA Reptasks: A Technical Perspective

This blog will cover the technical setup required to create HANA reptasks in Business Application Studio. In this scenario, we will be connecting to an on-prem S/4HANA instance and replicating the data into a HANA Cloud Service instance in Cloud Foundry.

Prerequisites:

◉ DPAgent installed, connected, and configured.

    ◉ There are several guides and blogs already available for this, and the setup is straightforward. Download the latest version from the SWDC by searching “HANA DP AGENT” in the downloads bar.

◉ HANA Cloud Service instance created.

Handling exception in HANA procedures

Before we start this discussion I would like to highlight the basic of exception what is an exception in terms of database procedure and how we handle this exceptions.

In the time of procedure execution if any issue occurs in specified operations like insert, update etc. with the input data then the exception occurred and we need to use some exception handler to handle this exception. This is call implicit exception.

In HANA we will use declare EXIT HANDLER to handle those exception.

There is another way you can create an exception using fulfill of certain declared condition CONDITION Using SIGNAL and RESIGNAL. This exception explicitly created.

SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA Conversion – A high-level guide for the beginners

“Every success story is a tale of constant adaption, revision and change.” – Richard Branson

In line with the very same philosophy, SAP rebuilt SAP ECC from the ground up to create SAP S/4HANA in 2015 to take advantage of SAP HANA’s performance and data analytics capabilities.

To start with a simple SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA conversion, the foremost thing to understand is the basic difference between the two.

Detailed Debugging Techniques for Functional consultants

'Debugging’ is a term, which is directly associated with programming. It is a general term used by all Software Professionals, irrespective of the language and platform. ‘Debugging’, as the name suggests, is used to debug the program. IN other words it is slow motion, step by step execution of the program, so that one can closely find, how the program/ software is working.

‘Debugging is typically used to fix the Bugs in the program but in SAP debugging is invariably used for understanding the flow of program itself.

‘Debugging’ has been a vital discussion and development point across the software industry for Years. Still, there are some languages, where fixing a bug is a nightmare.

In SAP, debugging had been a quite easy task. In SAP there are various ways to debug the program, additionally one can know the values of the variable withing the execution, which is a big help to the programming professionals.

Optimizing BDLS For HANA Large Scale Instances (HLIs)

Introduction:

The purpose of this blog post is to give the audience an overview of how I handled BDLS process in the refreshes of HANA Large Scale Instances. I will try to give as much information as possible (which is already publicly available and maybe not all be in a single place) and try to depict how I used it to build a solution.

The Motivation: 

All SAP Basis consultants had to deal with BDLS process in their careers at some point or the other, but it becomes a challenge and a pain when the size of the DB is in several TBs. The process then needs many hours or even days to run.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP S/4HANA 2021 Product Release

In this blog post, I have the pleasure to share with you the key aspects that bring intelligence to our Digital Core along with some of the highlights of the release.

Foundation of the Digital Core

Before we start with my top highlights from our SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP S/4HANA 2021 release, let’s find out what the foundation of the Digital Core is. We consider the following four aspects:

1. An architecture that delivers a scalable foundation to transact at the highest possible automation,

2. A system of intelligence that supports and steers the business using embedded analytics, simulation, prediction, and decision support to run LIVE business,

How to use HANA Exit in SAP Analytics Report [Selection Screen Default value]

Purpose / Issue –

SAP Analytics reports default value for Fiscal Year and Posting Period as Current Fiscal Year and Posting Period on the selection screen.

Report Selection Screen Value

Detecting Contextual Anomalies with SAP HANA ML

Introduction

What is an Anomaly?

The goal here is to detect outlier data points, which do not follow the collective common pattern of the majority of data points, hence can be easily separated from the group.

Some of the possible use cases here are: 

Tools of HANA SQL Data Warehouse

Introduction

Now with some weeks delay I want to continue and give an overview which tools are necessary or helpful to build a SAP HANA Data Warehouse with in this way.

SAP HANA SQL Data Warehousing offers a high degree of flexibility with regard to the use of different tools. The SQL approach makes it possible to use many well-known (open source) software development tools, especially in the context of the applied DevOps philosophy. But also the SAP HANA platform brings some important own tools for the development of the native SAP HANA SQL Data Warehouse.

One Stop View for Production Supervisor – Manage Process Order

In this blog, I shall introduce you to this new application ‘Manage Process Orders’, a SAP S/4HANA Fiori App which is designed, keeping the supervisor persona in mind. By the end of this blog, you will have a good understanding of the features, this application offers to equip the production supervisor to carry out the responsibility of detailed planning of the production process.

Typically a supervisor is responsible for managing process orders, editing and releasing of orders, monitoring the order execution, assessing the production issues, making sure all required materials and equipment are available for the production team and so on. Overall, he must ensure the production line is always running and active. Executing all these actions at one time, that too effortlessly and switching between various apps and performing manual transactions could be a tedious job for the supervisor.

What if there is a single application that supports maintenance of complete life cycle of a process order end-to-end?

Cascading Filter Prompts in SAP HANA Modelling

Cascading filters are a group of prompts where the selection of one filter regulates the list of values accessible for selection in the successive filters. The key intention for this cascading is to make sure a better user experience by providing users with valid combinations of input parameter values. This feature is liked by many customers as it allows them to have a preview of their data through prompts before essentially seeing the information.

For Instance: We have two filter prompts for our HANA calculation view Country and State filter, So if we select India as country in our first prompt so we’ll automatically get only states of India in list of values like below:

SAP IBP Order Based Integration Architecture Real Time Integration (RTI)

SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain (SAP IBP) is one of the fast growing planning tool across the various industries. IBP application offers five core modules which are tightly integrated to achieve one business model within the organization.

It eliminates the silos in the planning process. During the COVID-19 pandemic most of the organizations effects with supply chain disruptions and companies are learning from the COVID-19 impact and trying to build the best supply chain planning process across the organization to support current and future disruptions.

Now coming to importance of this blog post to provide the update on latest innovation from SAP IBP production development team with regards to integration between SAP Order Based Planning (OBP) with SAP and Non-SAP systems integration.

Mapping Risk in a Stormwater Network using SAP HANA Spatial and Graph

In this blog post I will show how to estimate the water load in a stormwater network and calculate the risk of an overload. Sure, I’m not a water network expert, but here is the idea: a stormwater network is a directed, (in our case mostly acyclic) graph made up of a set of edges/pipes and vertices/junctions. For each vertex we can calculate the catchment area, i.e. the area from which rain water most likely will enter the network via that vertex. Each vertex then propagates the load to its downstream network. By looking at the ratio of the pipe’s load and cross-section, we can estimate the overload risk for each pipe.

Employee Integration to Business Partner without HCM

INTRODUCTION

To use Some Fiori apps are required to have the employees ID or employee business partner integrated with the user ID to use the app such as Manage Purchasing Categories (F0337). This post shows how to create an employee business partner without integrating HCM using Fiori App Maintain Employees (F2288A). We can use Fiori app Maintain Employees (F2288A) to create employee data. With this app, we can integrate the business partner with the user ID. when we create employee data using the app Maintain Employees, the system will automatically create business partner data BUP003 role. Later on, you can modify your employee data using T-Code BP or Fiori app Maintain Employees.

Upcoming Workshop: Collaborative Database Development in SAP HANA Cloud

Collaboration is the key to successful database development. And as part of our Virtual Data and Analytics Forum, which began last week, we’ll be holding a special workshop session on Collaborative Database Development in SAP HANA Cloud, HANA Database.

This workshop will use hands-on sessions to guide participants through a number of important tasks, from changing data structures and automating application deployment to setting up template projects for use by your colleagues. SAP HANA Cloud’s flexible data management capabilities will be on full display.

Boost performance of SAP Analytics Cloud tables by using proper styling techniques

Does styling of my SAC table cause performance drawbacks?

In fact, every story designer can try out whether sophisticated styling is a performance driver of a table widget. Do the following to test whether performance issues of your table widget is caused by filthy formatting: Measure the performance of your table widget with styling and without styling and compare results. To remove all styling definitions of the table widget we can make use of table templates (figure 1) – switching the table template will prompt the story designer to eventually delete all styling definitions (figure 2) previously applied. In other words, styling will be reset after selecting a predefined template. Thereupon, we can use the refresh button at the toolbar to measure performance of the table widget without any applied styling. In case the table loads quicker without any formatting applied, this can be interpreted as a strong hint that previously applied styling definitions cause performance issues.

Gain first hands on experience with the new automated S/4HANA deployment in Microsoft Azure

Try out the new SAP S/4HANA 2020 FPS02 production-ready deployment in Microsoft Azure with the quick and easy approach of SAP Cloud Appliance Library ( SAP CAL). It applies to standards aligned by SAP and Microsoft and follows their best practice.

We are looking for customers and partners who want to register and share their feedback with us before end of November 2021. Our target group are SAP System administrators with access to Microsoft Azure.

The deployed system allows for integration into Landscape Management Cloud to leverage its possibilities for system operations. The deployment itself will also soon be part of a comprehensive integration with Software Logistics Toolset starting with system design in maintenance planner, running the installation and offering an integration with SAP Software Upgrade Manager and notes implementation.

How-to Review and Set SAP HANA Parameters Following Updated Recommendations

I have always found myself in below situations during my career as consultant for SAP HANA specifically in projects for implementation, migrations/upgrades, and even daily operation:

1. SAP HANA Parameters setup during initial installation, following SAP best practice or recommended value(s).

2. Review HANA Parameters of existing systems in case of HANA Support Pack Stacks or HANA Revision update.

It could be of company own systems, managing systems for customers, or from migration project taking over from other vendors.

Dynamic OData from “any” API through SAP BTP Kyma

Greetings! Today we will be bridging 3rd-party and SAP applications easily with the help of SAP BTP Kyma runtime. Let’s go! 🏃

Editable field selection in Verify Data Flow App

In this Blog, I will provide information you the information regarding how to visible editable field in Verify Data Flow App.

Verify Data Flow

We can use this component to post documents in Financial Accounting (FI) via a correction layer and suspense postings. We transfer documents from source systems into Financial Accounting. In these documents, there can be errors in the header or in the line-item data, for example, an incorrect company code or an incorrect balance. To perform these checks and automatically correct errors before posting, you can use the functions of Error Correction and Suspense Accounting (ECS).

Hands-On Tutorial: Script and deploy Python with the new Jupyter operator in SAP Data Intelligence

The new Jupyter operator brings interactive Python Notebooks into your SAP Data Intelligence pipelines. Script your notebook directly in the pipeline and deploy exactly the same notebook and pipeline into production. No need to script in one place and to copy / paste the code into a Python operator.

Learn how to use the operator with a Machine Learning example, that forecasts multiple time-series in SAP HANA using the embedded Automated Predictive Library.

With Python you can implement a million things, other than Machine Learning by the way. Data retrieval or data preparation or just two further uses cases.

Using Multiple Identity Providers in SAP HANA Cloud Administration Tooling

Recently, we introduced support for multiple identity providers (IdPs) in the SAP HANA Cloud administration tools (SAP HANA Cloud Central, SAP HANA cockpit, and SAP HANA database explorer). The benefit of using a custom IdP is that SAP HANA Cloud users can now be authenticated by their company’s IdP, as opposed to authentication via SAP ID Service. An identity provider creates and manages an organization’s user identity and associated identity attributes. With the user’s consent, IdPs offer authentication services to websites, applications, and other services by federating the identity and authenticating an end-user to the service provider using the identity the IdP manages, but without sharing actual login details. The basic mechanism of using custom IdP is as follows:

Pre-built Workflow Content to Handle Credit Memo Request in SAP S/4HANA

SAP Workflow Management enables the digitalization of workflows, decision management, and visibility on end-to-end business processes (SAP & non-SAP). It empowers business experts to configure new process variations in an LCNC (low-code/no-code) approach and provides business users with SAP Fiori-based user interfaces.

With SAP Workflow Management, our customer gets access to pre-built process content templates/samples across applications. A workflow content package can include re-usable workflow models, decision logic, dashboards to monitor the process, user interfaces, and integration flows to connect with the backend system. This enables our customers to import such templates, change them as per their requirements, and run the process in a limited time.

NSE: Systematically Measure Memory Savings

This guide will show a methodical approach to finding data with a large memory footprint and calculating the memory storage savings after moving them to disk via Native Storage Extension. The TPC-H dataset is used in this guide.

Assumptions:

◉ Reader has access to a provisioned SAP HANA instance SPS04+

◉ Reader has familiarity with Database Explorer, SAP HANA Cockpit, and HANA System Views

Cloud Integration (SAP CPI) – API_CV_ATTACHMENT_SRV (OData API for attachments)

Introduction:

Recently I faced a use case in which a integration flow needed to add an attachment to a supplier invoice, we have standard OData/SOAP API to perform operations like create, read, rename, and deletion of attachments, In this blog I’m going to discuss adding (creating) an attachment to supplier invoice by consuming OData API.

Pre-requisite:

1. Before consuming the OData API make sure that API_CV_ATTACHMENT_SRV oData API is active ,system client ID and alias name maintained.

2. Check the entity list and make sure “AttachmentContentSet” entity set is present to create an attachment.

Near Zero Downtime Maintenance

Maintenance windows for SAP systems can be very limited because companies cannot afford extended downtimes since some of these systems are really key to production, for example the Supply Chain Management or the Customer Relationship Management among others,

Any SAP Basis, OS and Infrastructure engineer knows how challenging it can be to finish successfully and in time a maintenance on the SAP servers of the company and besides if it is for production hosts they should be carried out outside business hours which is an added effort.

Another challenge the IT departments need to deal with quite often when it comes to the SAP estate is to get the buy from the business so that the servers can be kept up to date regularly with all the recommendations from SAP notes, security fixes, patches, etc. Many times they get push-back because the users cannot afford too regular maintenance windows and the systems risk becoming not compliant or vulnerable.

SAP’s Data Warehouse Strategy for Healthcare Providers

In this blog post, I am going to present SAP’s latest strategic statement of direction for data warehousing and show the consequences for typical health care providing companies. The goal is to establish a common understanding of requirements and to show a way forward for healthcare companies on their way to become intelligent enterprises and data driven companies. With this, you will get clarity and confidence for future investments in the BI field.

Requirements and Challenges

Time To Value: Fast development and deployment cycles are key for healthcare companies to react to changing environments and new challenges. Self-service capabilities like modelling in non-tech business languages or a common business catalog describing the data foster the collaboration of business and IT and help to accelerate BI projects.

Freight Collaboration with SAP Logistics Business network (LBN) and its integration with SAP Transportation Management (TM)

SAP has developed & released a cloud application called as ‘Logistics business network (LBN)’ to network and communication with partners (Shippers, Carriers, Customs authorities etc) involved in logistics (warehousing & transportation) operations. LBN has 3 components

1. Freight collaboration

2. Global track & trace (GTT)

3. Material traceability

LBN can be integrated with SAP ECC , S/4HANA, Transportation management ( TM ) and Extended warehouse management (EWM).

CAP: Access the HANA DB behind (via HANA Explorer)

When you create a CAP application with HANA as the database, it is not very intuitive to find how to explore tables/views of the application (being a developer). This method can also be used for loading initial data (via xlsx, csv files) to your tables during production cutover.

In this short blog, I will explain how to do that.

What won’t work?

If you go to your HANA Cloud instance ( in the Space ) and open the HANA explorer, this actually tries to open the explorer via the HANA Cockpit so it requires you to know the DBADMIN credentials which as a developer you will not have. Moreover sharing DBADMIN credentials is not safe as this single HANA instance can be serving Sandbox, Dev, QA landscapes and DBADMIN can edit/view tables of all applications in all of those landscapes.

Key Concepts in Privacy Technologies

Introduction

We live in a digital age, where our personal data is collected, processed, and disclosed at an unprecedented rate. Various Privacy Technologies and Privacy Risk Management Framework are being evolved today to address growing need to protect personal or sensitive data. Privacy being a fundamental right in many geographies and international organizations, the government around the world are in a frenzied race to enact privacy regulations and make it mandatory for organization that collect and process personal to adhere to the core principles of data protections and privacy. In particular, there has been greater emphasis on privacy enhancing technologies to protect the personal data such as technologies that are available for consent management, data minimization, data tracking, data anonymization, de-identification, pseudonymisation, encryptions, tokenization, masking, obfuscation, access control and identity, authentication and authorizations. In this blog, we will review some of the key data privacy technologies commonly deployed and how SAP HANA supports various privacy technology to provide tools for our customers as a data controller to meet the compliance. For the sake of simplicity, only high level concepts are presented in this blog.

Run XSA application(UI part) locally with visual studio code

I have been working on XSA for a while, the SAP WEB IDE FOR SAP HANA is a bit outdated(especially for ui5 development) and sometimes not that performant. Recently i managed to move the xsa application to visual studio code and run the UI part(for now) locally. This blog post will show you how I moved and the solution for the issue encountered during the setup.

Note: This blog post is about moving your xsa development (UI part at least) to visual studio code, not about using visual studio code to do xsa app development from scratch

some prerequisite:

1.visual studio code +plugin

2.node js+ git

3. a running xsa application in your xsa( to get the destination and service binding info)

Near real time Data Replication from Salesforce to SAP HANA using the Advantco Salesforce adapter for SDI

Introduction

Salesforce provides APIs that enable external applications to receive events in near real time mode. In this blog, we provide a detailed configuration steps for two of these options: Platform Event and Change Data Capture (CDC). Platform Event is an excellent option when data from multiple objects are required as in the case of combining data from Opportunity with details from the Account object. Change Data Capture (CDC) provides a quick and configurable option to publish data of a specific object like Account or Contact.

The solution we describe here is based on SAP Smart Data Integration (SDI) tools which provide features to support data replication from external resources to SAP HANA. The two most important components in this context are the Data Provisioning Server, which is a native SAP HANA process, and the Data Provisioning Agent, which is a container running outside the HANA environment. The Advantco Salesforce adapter is deployed on the Data Provisioning Agent host and can be configured from the HANA environment duration the creation of a remote source. The remote source is the connection from SAP HANA to the Salesforce instance.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud Fit-to-standard approach for technical areas

Introduction

There are lot´s of good SAP blog posts, which describe Fit-to-standard methodology. Many of them highlight main points for business-related topics. I would like to sum up my experience in relation to SAP S/4HANA Cloud Implementation Fit-to-standard methodology for technical topics. There are following streams in SAP S/4HANA Cloud implementation projects, which require more technical knowledge, rather than business:

• Integration
• Migration
• Output Management
• Embedded Analytics
• Master Data Management
• Extensibility
• Security

Integrating SAP HANA Data Lake to Google Big Query – DL2BQ

A Simple Architecture:

Pre-requisites: You must have your btp trial account up and running & data lake instance should also be running & have your credentials also ready for an open database connectivity

You should also have your gcp trial account ready – & make sure you have downloaded the gcp credentials in json format locally in your system.

Error Handling in HANA

Requirement –

This blog explains how we can Implement Error Handling in HANA Sql to maintain data reliability, durability & consistency during execution of multiple DML statements in a single code block.

Implementation Scenario –

Let’s say, we have HANA stored procedure or Sql Code block and it has 5 Insert statements inserting data in a table (HXE_SAMPLE.ERROR_TEST) which has Primary Key defined on ID Column.

Sample Table Structure –

CREATE TABLE HXE_SAMPLE.ERROR_TEST (ID INTEGER PRIMARY KEY);

Aggregate Data from Multiple SAP HANA Sources to One SAP HANA Cloud, HANA data lake IQ

With SAP HANA Cloud, hybrid landscapes (on-premise systems working with cloud systems) have become easily attainable. However, when doing aggregate data analysis, it might be easier to have the data of interest in a single source to keep data types and functionality consistent. We will see that with a HANA Cloud database and remote connections, the movement of data from multiple HANA instances to an SAP HANA Cloud data lake can be done from a single SQL console!

Today, I am going to bring data from an on-premise SAP HANA system together with an SAP HANA Cloud database in a single SAP HANA data lake. I will start from a landscape which has an SAP HANA Cloud database, SAP HANA database, and SAP HANA data lake connected.

Monitoring & Analysis for SAP HANA Platform

The described aims to enlighten the audience about the Real-time Monitoring capabilities exposed by the SAP HANA platform. System Administrators maintain the integrity and consistency of the SAP HANA platform by performing regular system monitoring which helps with identifying system behavioral patterns. A combination of monitoring tools and checks provides a detailed technical overall system health check and helps with identifying and forecast requirements against possible data & Hardware bottlenecks.

An adequate System monitoring exercise involves continuous monitoring of the following but not limited to these environmental components:

How To Do DTO in BW/4HANA Step by Step

This document provides the details of DTO implementation in BW4/HANA NLS-IQ 16.x

Data Tiering Optimization(DTO) helps SAP BW/4HANA customers to classify the data stored in the DataStore object (advanced) as hot, warm or cold, depending on the cost and performance requirements for the data.

Depending on this classification and how the data is used, the data is stored in different storage areas.

Output Management: adding contact person to Billing Document form in SAP S/4HANA Cloud

Introduction

One of the popular requirements in terms of adjusting output forms is to add contact person to the document header. In Billing Documents, for example, there is no such default field, therefore custom field and logic are necessary. In most cases we can use name of employee, who created the document as contact person name. Let´s have a look, how to implement this requirement in Invoice form.

SAP Security Authorization Trace & Checks

Introduction

Authorization trace is mainly performed to identify and record the missing access against the user access. Tracing supports when the default authorization values are stored in Tcodes like SU22 and SU24 and when maintaining the same authorization data for roles. Traces are of basically of types, they can be either system-wide or limited to a specific user or instance. Tracing can be executed for trouble- shooting, especially for missing access in SAP GUI by validating the access provided to the SAP User ID. This article majorly describes how to perform tracing in R/3, ECC and S/4 systems.

Users & Access

For delivering the day-to-day business requirements in SAP, users require ID and password to login. The types of users that login to SAP are categorized as follows:

Introduction to Intelligent Scenario Lifecycle Management(ISLM)

Overview

Intelligent Scenario Lifecycle Management (ISLM) is a framework that allows you to perform lifecycle management operations on machine learning scenarios. You can consider ISLM as a self-service tool that allows you to handle various operation requirements of machine learning scenarios. You can train an intelligent scenario and use the trained model to get an accurate inference result.

Depending on the machine learning scenario that is associated with a business application, the scenarios can be categorized as:

◉ Embedded: In this approach, a business application, for example SAP S/4HANA runs in the same stack as its machine learning provider SAP HANA machine learning with the analytics libraries SAP HANA Automated Predictive Library (APL) or SAP HANA Predictive Analysis Library (PAL). APL exposes the data mining capabilities of an Automated Analytics engine for developing predictive modelling processes for business analysts. PAL offers advanced analytics algorithms for data scientists. This can be used to solve use cases of forecasting, trending, and so on.

SAP Central Finance & FSCM with Central Payment

In this blog we will only focus on the impact of SAP Central Payment activation on the FSCM processes running in the organization in ECC systems.

Lets assume (for the sake of keeping it simple) we just have one SAP ECC as source system and of course one SAP S/4HANA system as a target system.

SAP S/4HANA Service overview and Service Order Processing

Overview

During ERP era Customer Service (CS) component supports all the processes related to Services which we provide to customers. We can Structure and create Technical Object, manage data for Warranties, Create Service Requests, bill the cost occurred during service processing. However, this is not part of long-term scope in SAP S/4HANA journey. CS will no longer available after 2025, hence no license and support would be provided as well. Moreover, SAP could choose to remove them at any time after 2025.

SAP is providing the solutions to cover the scope of CS within S/4HANA itself.

Until S/4HANA 1809 the new service functionality was an add-on for S/4HANA called Customer Management.

SAP 3D Visual Enterprise Manufacture Planner (SAP 3D VEMP)

Growing complexities of any industry along with its own growth provides a way to compete and try to derive best solution possible. Same happened with discrete manufacturing industry, big giants like SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, and others focused their will to deliver a best-known solution to make the complex process of discrete manufacturing easy to consume for the customer. Integration of the solution with all other modules of complete Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) process is exciting and a big challenge for everyone. More exciting is to find out the solutions they provide and how they differ and challenges the complexity of the discrete manufacturing industry problems.

Augment your Python Analysis with Multi-Model data in SAP HANA Cloud

A lot of data science and machine learning work is done in Python. For this, the “Python machine learning client for SAP HANA” (hana-ml for short) provides easy access to SAP HANA tables in the form of Pandas compatible data-frames. However, with its multi-model capabilities (like spatial, graph, and document store), SAP HANA has more to offer. In this blog post, you will learn about the enhancements of the library to support these multi-model capabilities and how you can leverage them for your work. We will walk through an end-to-end example based on Wellington’s stormwater network. We will evaluate and visualize the graph and show how we can analyze problems that might occur in the network based on built in graph algorithms. The data and code is available on github.com. If you want to run the Jupyter Notebook yourself, you need to take care about the prerequisites.

Order-Related Replenishment in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Warehouse Management

In this blog post we will cover Order-Related Replenishment at Storage Type level with Rough Bin Determination.

Rough bin determination means the storage type must be written to the delivery item even if no stock exists. You specify that the storage type (without storage bin) is written to the source data of a delivery item, even if there is no stock for the product in the storage type. This enables you to use the order-related replenishment to perform replenishment for the pick storage type, since a requirement for picking occurs in this storage type as a result of this. If rough bin is not enabled, the storage type is generally not used if there is no stock for the product in that storage type.

Characteristics of Order-Related Replenishment:

◉ Like planned replenishment, it can be triggered either interactively or in the background

◉ It calculates replenishment quantities according to open warehouse request quantity

◉ It is started when stock figure is lower than the required quantity

◉ It rounds up to multiples of minimum replenishment quantity

◉ Exceeding maximum quantity is possible 

Connecting HANA DB using python Language

1. Overview

This document will explain you, how to connect HANA database and table operations using python language.

2.  Prerequisites for HANA connectivity from Python

◉ Python latest software installation

Mass Change of Sales Documents

In this blog, I will share with you the minimum configuration needed to activate and leave the app ready to use. Also, a tour of its functionalities, the multiple available fields you can change, and the option to include a new field by extensibility.

Let´s start with the required configurations:

Step 1 – Activate the services as indicated in the Fiori app library in the level “Implementation Information”.

Step 2 – It is necessary to configure the number of parallel processes it allows. Please check this with your technical team to avoid any negative impact on the daily operations.

HANA – Multiple(selected) tables binary data export / Import using script

HANA admin / developers frequently get tasks to export/import selective list of HANA tables data to disk for stage refresh,  backup, re-partitioning  etc.

Developed bash script code helps automate export or import activity for multiple selective tables.

Features

◉ Server level export /import execution instead from studio as client

◉ script can be run in background at HANA server and progress can be monitor

◉ easy configuration using hdbuserstore

◉ input list of tables and script will take care of export /import

SAP HANA Fast Restart Option (tmpfs) – Reducing Downtime without Persistent Memory

The goal of fast restart option is to improve large in-memory SAP HANA database restart times. This article outlines the plan to address this important area of reducing downtime with a step by step approach, recommendation on tmpfs sizing and FAQ’s.

To understand the concept of fast restart option (FRO) with tmpfs, basic understanding of tmpfs file system functioning is required

Basics Of tmpfs filesystem: –

tmpfs (temporary file system) is a virtual filesystem created to store files in dynamic (volatile) memory also known as DRAM (RAM). Tmpfs filesystem is typically created on RAM.

Cost Center Commitments in SAP S/4HANA Cloud

Introduction

Commitment management in SAP S/4HANA tracks future commitments against cost objects (I.e. Cost center, Internal order etc.) This helps user to do comparison between actuals and commitments. Commitment amounts are available as information for reporting purpose. You cannot use commitments to prevent user from creating the purchase order that exceeds budget. Prevent user to post actual greater than budgeted is available in Availability Control functionality in SAP S/4HANA Cloud. Commitment management is a part of the cost monitoring process. Commitment Management line items are triggered by purchase requisitions and purchase orders that utilize cost centers. These commitments are updated in Extension Ledger 0E (pre-delivered) in the ACDOCA table. Commitments are reduced by various business transactions such as goods receipt, service entry sheet etc.

Perspectives on Future of Data Privacy and Challenges

Introduction

We live in an exciting era where business is transforming at an unprecedented rate that we have not fully come to grasp its impact on data privacy. Look at the statistics which are staggering. Globally, smartphone penetration is estimated to be 8 billion smartphone subscriptions worldwide. An average smart phone user has 80 application on its phone and approximately 10 application are used daily. The mobile phone application collects enormous amount of personal data such as GPS location, IP addresses, voice, video, contact lists, text messages, passwords, call history. The e-commerce and service providers use advance digital technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Software Robotics to profile and process personal data. Realizing the impact of data privacy and harm it may cause to individuals and society, many countries globally have been enacting data privacy regulations.

Closing the Experience Gap with Customers using S/4 HANA and Qualtrics

Managing Customer Experience:

While an unhappy customer might start to ring alarm bells, most of the successful companies see it as an opportunity to resolve the complaint and keep the customer loyal. In fact, 73% of customers say they stay loyal to brands because of friendly customer service agents. (HubSpot, 2021).

More Info: C_HANATEC_17 Key Points

So, it’s an opportunity to demonstrate to your customer in a much more direct and personal way that their feedback is important, and you care about the outcome.

But it’s not just about preventing unhappy customers from becoming detractors – it’s equally useful to follow up with neutral customers and turn them into promoters.

Advanced Return Management Integration with SAP S/4 HANA Embedded EWM 2020

This blog is specifically written how ARM for customer return can be integrated to SAP embedded EWM 2020

SAP Data Intelligence: Insert JSON Data into SAP HANA or SAP Data Warehouse Cloud

Introduction

JSON is a widely spread format for exchanging and storing structured data. It enjoys great popularity in the age of microservices, e.g. for exchanging data between servers and clients via RESTful APIs. In this blog post, I’ll show you how to persist data in JSON format to an SAP HANA table or an SAP Data Warehouse Cloud table using SAP Data Intelligence.

For this purpose, the “SAP HANA Client” operator in SAP Data Intelligence is used. In addition to other options, such as executing SQL commands and inserting csv. data, it offers the possibility to persist JSON files in SAP HANA and SAP Data Warehouse Cloud. It is crucial that the file has the correct format. You can see examples of the correct implementation of the JSON file in this blog post.

Slipups & Limitations while Exposing S/4HANA Launchpad Content via Content Federation

SAP BTP Launchpad service could be used as a central point of access to SAP, custom-build and third-party applications and extensions there by leading to higher user productivity.

The Fiori content can be exposed to BTP launchpad manually or via Content federation. To know how S/4HANA launchpad content can be federated to BTP, check out this Tutorial on developers.sap.com. This is a detailed set by step process.

While I tried this , I stumbled upon couple of issue and had spend some time to figure out what’s wrong and that is what i want to share in this blog so as to help others in case they face they same issue. We will also look at some of the content federation limitations.

Some Different Approach for SAP S/4 HANA Upgrade

As we all know SAP has some robust documentation and approach in upgrading from lower release of S/4 HANA to higher release. This personal insight is just based on some lessons learned and how we can proactively take control to ensure that we adhere to a timeline with less uncertainty.

While working on some of the upgrade projects,   we have come across some common issues, and as we all learn from our experience. This blog will help us to dig into the system and understand it beforehand so that there is no surprise at a later point in time.

Core Features for Palling and Their Benefits in SAP Analytics Cloud

SAP analytics cloud is the go-to tool for businesses looking to distribute funds for R&D, improve their sales, forecast their future processes, and reallocate their market spend. It offers practical and intelligent analytics to keep any business on its toes and aware of its presence in the market.

The latest addition to the SAP Analytics Cloud is developed for business plans and to consolidate operations in unison with predictive analytics in the functionalities components of any business. As a result, businesses leverage their strengths and weaknesses by improving their success scores and developing new strategies to operate better in the market.

Know Your Dependencies – Network Tracing with SAP HANA Graph

In this blog post, I will show how to use some basic SAP HANA Graph functions to understand dependencies in a directed graph. The demo data describes python packages and their dependencies. Resolving package dependencies is required if a package manager like “Anaconda” needs to check for pre-requisites before installing a new package. However, the patterns discussed in this article are generic and apply to use cases in manufacturing, utilities, IT and many other industries. The data and code is available on github.

Cash Management – How to combine Cash Flow Analyzer and reports Cash Position and Liquidity Forecast FF7AN/FF7BN

Today I would like to talk about Cash Management in SAP S/4HANA. There is great news about this business process, no matter if the decision was to go for the basic or the advanced version of it. Today, it  is possible to work with Cash Position and Liquidity Forecast (AKA FF7AN and FF7BN) from the backend or the Launchpad, together with Cash Flow Analyzer app, to obtain better and more complete information about financial flows derived from items in Finance and Logistics.

As Cash Flow Analyzer uses a predefined structure and brings more dynamism in financial position visualization with less selection criteria, let´s move thru its different selection fields and see how we could get a similar output in Cash Management and Forecast FF7AN /FF7BN transaction.

Using the graph engine in SAP HANA for Master Data Substitution

What is Master Data Substitution?

Master Data Substitution is a process when requested master data entity can be substituted by another one. Master Data substitution is very generic framework which supports different master data entities and provides various features like Exclusion, Grouping, Context Objects, Validities etc.

Example: Product Substitution. In Sales order, if Customer is requesting for Product A, but this product A is not available due to out of stock or for any other reason we will not be fulfilling customer demands. But Product B is available which is having the similar specifications as product A, then Product B can be substituted and fulfill customer demands. Product B can further be substituted with Product C and Product C can be substituted with Product D.

S/4HANA Fashion Purchase Order and Season Determination

Introduction

The integration between the fashion industry and the season is seamless. Thus, it is far more important as the article purchasing, production or selling depends according to the demand within the respective season. Mainly, seasons such as spring, summer, fall, winter / holiday, and no season will be configured in SAP within the fashion industry. The “no season” is created to cater a particular article all throughout the year. Hence, the applicability of article is determined based on the season assigned, in which it could be assigned to a new season or carry over season (same article valid for the next upcoming season).

Read More: C_HANAIMP_16

Advanced ATP Release for Delivery in SAP S/4HANA

Introduction

This blog is for SD consultants. I used SAP S/4HANA OP2020 FPS01 version.

What is Release for Delivery

It is manual back order process.

Read More: C_TADM55a_75 Key Points

After advanced ATP BOP you can also modify the results manually just before creating delivery documents.

You have to create delivery documents through Release for delivery, if you modify confirmed quantity by using it.

The SAP HANA Cockpit Dump File Viewer

Overview:

The SAP HANA cockpit Dump File Viewer is a new application introduced in SAP HANA cockpit SP 13. It can be utilized for displaying critical state information and simplifying the analysis of database performance issues. When there is an error situation in SAP HANA and a dump file is created, the Dump File Viewer can help users to easily view, analyze, and navigate within the dump file contents to determine the cause of the problem. There are different types of dump files available to analyze:

More Info: C_HANATEC_12 Key Points

◉ RTE – A runtime environment dump that is manually created by running the “runtimedump dump” command in the hdbcons command-line tool.

◉ OOM – An out of memory dump that is created when the system runs into an out of memory situation.

◉ Crash – A crash dump that is written when SAP HANA runs into a situation that causes the operating system (OS) process to crash.

Access Salesforce custom objects from HANA Cloud via SDI

I’m going to explain how to connect in the following sections.

1. Install DP Agent and configure SAP HANA Cloud connection

2. Deploy and register the adapter for Salesforce

3. Add remote source to SAP HANA Cloud

Prerequisites

Prepare following environments in advance.

1. Salesforce

2. SAP HANA Cloud

3. An operating system which DP Agent will be installed (Linux / Windows)

Using SAP HANA Graph to map relationships between different SAP products

In this blog post I cover how you can use the power of SAP HANA Graph to map/keep track of the relationships between different SAP products.

In our jobs as developers/consultants/architects, it is expected from us to know how different SAP products relate with each other or how they integrate with 3rd party products. This can be especially challenging given the number of products/components/services that SAP provides. In my attempt to keep track of this I have notes, diagrams, links, documentation that help me understand how they relate to each other. Unfortunately, that data is not that well organized.

Product Availability Check in STO based on issuing storage location in S/4Hana Cloud

Introduction

This blog post has been written to address common customer query on PAC in STO. When an intercompany purchase order (PO) is raised by one plant to procure stock in another plant, customer need to be able to specify a supplying/issuing storage location as well as the supplying plant.

When the issuing storage location is not editable then when the outbound delivery needs to be created at the supplying plant, it is necessary to first move the stock required on the purchase order to the default supplying storage location . After this generate the outbound delivery. This is an unnecessary extra step that complicates and makes the process less efficient

Using the SUM Prerequisite Check Extended to Prepare Your Conversion to SAP S/4HANA

There are many tools to help you prepare for a system conversion to S/4HANA. From to the Prepare Phase with the SAP Readiness Check and Maintenance Planner to the Explore Phase, using the SUM itself as a Prerequisite Check tool prior to your Sandbox cycle. This is every helpful for the technical team early in the project to discover some of the errors reported by SUM tool on the source system. Or they are waiting on the functional team to resolve the many simplification items errors, which is usually trigger a hard stop (e.g. RUN_S4H_SIF_CHECK_EXEC steps in SUM), or simply waiting on infrastructure or HANA DB procurement for those who are on a classical database.

Use Geospatial Methods and Predicates feature in SAP HANA

Business Example:

There is a requirement from a client where the client wants to calculate the distances between their customers and their stores. Typically, locations or addresses in a database are stored in text fields, making it difficult to pinpoint the exact geographical locations.

To be able to calculate distances accurately, you have decided to store the geographical locations of the customers and stores, using the SAP HANA geospatial model and its related functions.

Scheduling Python code on Cloud Foundry

This blog starts with a very simple example to schedule a Python file on Cloud Foundry, just to introduce the most important steps. That concept is then extended to schedule a Python file, which applies a trained Machine Learning model in SAP HANA.

Run Python file locally

We would like to schedule a Python file, not a Jupyter Notebook. Hence use your preferred local Python IDE or editor to run this simple file, helloworld.py.

Piecewise Linear Trend with Automated Time Series Forecasting (APL)

If you are a user of APL time series, you probably have seen models fitting a linear trend or a quadratic trend to your data. With version 2113 the Automated Predictive Library introduces an additional method called Piecewise Linear that can detect breakpoints in your series. You don’t have to do anything new to take advantage of this functionality, the trend is detected automatically as shown in the example below.

For SAP Analytics Cloud users, note that Piecewise Linear Trend is coming with  the 2021.Q3 QRC (August release).

Using SDI FileAdapter to write to Azure file share

In this blog we will create an Azure file share and use it as a destination for SAP SDI FileAdapter.

Prerequisites

1. Azure Account

2. SAP HANA Data Provisioning Agent server enabled

3. SAP HANA Data Provisioning Agent installed

Let’s start by creating the Azure file share. Login to the Azure portal and create a premium storage account  as depicted in the below screenshot

SAP HANA XS Advanced Administration, Deployment and Operations

1. Deployment Options

There are various ways of deploying the XS Advanced runtime. Before deploying the XSA many scenarios need to considered that will have impact on your landscape maintenance activity .For example the system refresh scenarios where you will need to refresh only a certain tenants instead of complete system this deployment plays a key role . I will go through the limitations in detail in backup restore section. In general, The following additional services run where XSA is deployed:

◉ xscontroller: Central management component of XSA. It has a view on all deployed and/or running applications, and persists configuration and status information in the database

SAP on AZURE/ SAP on AWS : Cost Optimized DR Solutions for HANA : Lean/Skinny DR

Running SAP on the HANA database is not only having multiple advantages, but also few cons as well. The hardware cost to run the HANA database is one of them. Since HANA is an in-memory database, customers must provision higher-size RAM and CPU to run their SAP on HANA. Even in hyper scaler environments like AZURE/AWS, HANA VM (M-Series) cost is huge comparatively and concern for most of the customers.

Keeping this in mind, designing a disaster recovery solution for HANA is a very challenging one.&To address this design challenge, we can consider multiple cost-optimized options like

The DMEEX Trace Tool

With the release of SAP S/4HANA 2020 Feature Pack 1 (onPremise), DMEEX receives one of the biggest updates in its lifetime. We implemented a tool that opens and clarifies DMEEX Engine processing. In this tool, you can see and analyze how the DMEEX tree was processed in detail, without the need to debug its code. We call this tool the DMEEX Trace Tool.

How to Setup SAP HANA Multi-Target System Replication

SAP HANA System Replication is a reliable high availability and disaster recovery solution that provides continuous synchronization of a HANA database to a secondary location either in the same data center or remote site as a disaster recovery site.

More Info: SAP HANA Certification

In this article fI have tried to keep it simple on how to setup a system replication when you want to replicate single primary to multiple target which may be in same data center or at remote site.

For better understanding let us assume below.

Solution Order Management in SAP S/4 HANA Cloud 2105

In the 2008 release, SAP S/4 HANA Cloud introduced Solution Order Management in response to market demand for a hybrid solution in which sales and service functions merge seamlessly. Solution Order Management helps customers grow their margins by transitioning away from selling individual products and services to providing bundled business solutions consisting of products, one-time services, and recurring service subscriptions. With the 2105 SAP S/4 HANA Cloud release, we have broadened the scope of Solution Order Management, and in this blog, I’ll take you through a few of the key updates.  

Update on Basic Shipping for SAP S/4HANA 2020

SAP’s strategy for Transportation Solutions in SAP S/4HANA

Since the introduction of SAP S/4HANA® some of the previous modules/solutions available in SAP ECC became available through something called “Compatibility Packs”. A Compatibility Pack (CP) is a version of a standard SAP Business Suite software product that is compatible with SAP S/4HANA.

Compatibility packs:

◉ Cover functionality from SAP ERP core or line-of-business (LoB) or industry solutions

◉ Comprise the complete or partial scope of the related SAP Business Suite product

◉ Will be phased out in favor of other strategic solutions that may have similar functionality to that within the CP software and may have a separate license.

A tip of defining Synonyms at HDI using SAP Business Application Studio

Purpose

I found accessing tables in HDI container using SAP BAS is a bit of tricky and have been juggling of how to use the form editor for synonym. Here is a tip for someone who might have been in the same dilemma as I have, or for who don’t want to spend time on investigating and heading around in trying to find the reason as I did.

Environment

A  table (“city”) & the data have been generated in an external data source – Data Lake whose connection is already established on HANA Data Explore (Please refer to other blog if you need to link external data sources to HANA ). I created a schema ‘booking’ in my HANA cloud.

Adaptation Project: New Facet with Smart table (OData Redefinition & Translation)

Adaptation Projects or say it application variant, is a feature to extend SAP delivered/Standard fiori elements app.

In this blog post, I will show step by step:

1. How to re-define the OData service

2. Create adaptation project in web IDE with new facet

3. Deployment process

4. Translation for the variant, tile and entity in another language

5. And last configuring the tile for the FLP

Mass Update of SLT Advanced Replication Settings

Requirement: Need to add a new column DW_LOAD_DATE (containing system timestamp) for all tables replicating from S/4HANA to Enterprise HANA. This will enable us to understand the exact timestamp when a particular record was replicated to HANA.

Challenge: Currently we have more than 180 tables in active replication. Adding DW_LOAD_DATE manually to each table in the configuration is very time consuming, error prone and most of all boring.

Possible Solutions:

1. Manual Addition

2. Addition of field via Template Maintenance

3. Mass Update by editing the Exported Advanced Replication Settings Files.

Populate Dates Between Start & End Dates

Requirement

This blog is intended to show how we can fill the dates if dates are saved in two columns as StartDate or EndDate ( Refer Sample Data of Date Rang Table Screenshot).

We have one Transaction table which is having data for each day (Example: PGI_DATE).

In another table, data is entered by date range.

Intelligent Asset Accounting with SAP S/4HANA Cloud

In this blog post we will see how the traditional Asset Accounting processes which were manual, tedious, time consuming gets automated with innovations in intelligent technologies like SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation.

Asset Accounting processes –

1. Update Asset master

2. Asset Acquisition

3. Asset Transfer within company code

4. Asset Transfer across company code

5. Asset Retirement

6. Asset Retirement by Scrapping

How to install & run the ABAP on HANA Sizing Report (SAP Note 1872170) – A Step-by-Step Guide

In this blog post you will get a clear, step-by-step process of how to install and run the ABAP Sizing Report (described in SAP Note 1872170), with screenshots accompanying each step.

Steps involved

1) Check System Version

The first thing to do is to verify the version of your system that you are going to install and run the report on. This report runs on SAP_BASIS 620 and higher.

Develop UI5 / Fiori App Using VS code.

Step 1:

1. Install Node.js  – Node.js® is a JavaScript runtime built on Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine.

2. Install VS Code – Visual Studio Code is a code editor redefined and optimized for building and debugging modern web and cloud applications Link.

Step 2:

Create a folder and open it in VS code.

In VS code go to Extensions(cntrl +shift+ X).

SAP HANA on Google Cloud + NetApp CVS: non-disruptive volume size and performance scaling to fit workload needs

SAP HANA on Google Cloud + NetApp Cloud Volume Service: Resizing volume size and performance to fit your workload needs in a non-disruptive manner.

If your HANA instance is running on Google Cloud, utilizing NetApp CVS, you can take advantage of its non disruptive, flexible volume scaling that fits performance needs. It provides you the flexibility to increase / decrease volume size to juggle between performance and cost in uptime.

For example, you can easily increase the volume size to boost up disk throughput to improve the duration of HANA startup, Data Loading, System Migration, S/4 Conversion, Import/Export, Backup/ Restore, eliminate system standstill/ performance issue during critical workload (month end processing, high volume of change activities, etc) that could possibly caused by long savepoint duration due to disk I/O bottlenecks and etc. Once the ad-hoc workload is completed, the volume can be scaled to a size in uptime that fits your HANA DB size and meets the HANA disk KPIs during normal operation to save some unnecessary cost.

Planning UAT across SAP S/4HANA and SAP IBP: 5 Lessons from the Real World

SAP implementation project delivery is heavy lifting, when you look to implement S/4HANA or SAP IBP full suite just by itself. It’s order of magnitude more complex when you need to implement S/4HANA and IBP full suite together in a greenfield environment. This is even more so, if you are looking to implement IBP Order Based Planning along with S/4HANA against complex business requirements, such as configurable products.

I would like to share lessons learned in planning User Acceptance Test UAT across S/4HANA and IBP. Learn how to plan when you have common testers across S/4 and IBP – how to mitigate the bottleneck risk, how to develop a test plan for a highly complex solution, and how to balance the conflicting needs of Business Teams vs. IT/PMO teams when it comes to substance vs. schedule.

Querying ABAP CDS views from an ArcGIS HANA tenant

More and more of our customers that run SAP ERP and ArcGIS Enterprise are knocking down silos between GIS and transactional data by referencing their transactional data from ArcGIS Enterprise. This is made possible by putting an ArcGIS geodatabase on HANA or HANA Cloud and using HANA’s Smart Data Access (SDA) to query the transactional data on the fly.

Another key component that makes this possible is a sync framework which captures the transactional asset ID and saves it as an attribute in the corresponding ArcGIS feature class. For example, the SAP Object ID for a power pole is stored in the corresponding feature in the power pole feature class (a “foreign key relationship”). The same process plays out on the SAP side where the geometry ID of a feature in an ArcGIS feature class is stored as an attribute of the asset in SAP ERP. SAP’s Geographical Enablement Framework (GEF) relies on the sync framework to make sure that assets in SAP have corresponding geometries in ArcGIS Enterprise and vice-versa. The GEF enabled Plant Maintenance module enables Plant Maintenance workers to do their work on a map. RE-FX and Project Management can be enabled with GEF as an engineered service. Remember that GEF is for the users of these ERP modules, but what about everyone else in the enterprise?

BAdI Implementation in ABAP on HANA for BW Extractors

Introduction:

BAdI Enhancement for BW Extractors in S/4 HANA system.

The Logic for the enhancement of BW datasource is traditionally written in ABAP Function Module Exit or ABAP BAdI. But, now with S/4 HANA, BAdI is the default place to write the logic for Enhancement (Function Module Exit is still available but might not be going forward).

With S/4 HANA we have a flexibility to write logic in HANA Optimized ABAP code using new coding techniques (New Open SQL syntax).

Enabling cold store data access using view for external access (The ‘8’ View) for aDSOs in BW reports with mixed modelling scenario

As promised in my earlier blog post, in this article I will be explaining the possibilities of using the view for external access or the external SAP HANA SQL view for aDSOs or the generated ‘8’ view of aDSOs. The main idea is to gain optimum performance avoiding unnecessary access to cold storage when only Hot data is requested. For details about the ‘8’ view please have a look into the above mentioned blog post link.

For this illustration, I will use the same aDSO used for the earlier blog post : SALESADSO, which has some sample sales data for calendar year 2019 & 2020. Executing suitable DTO rule, I have moved all the data residing in partitions covering calendar year 2019 to external cold storage (IQ). So, the view for external access for the aDSO : /BIC/ASALESADSO8, has the COLD_STORE_FLAG column populated as : ‘X’ for all data belonging to year 2019 & ‘ ‘ for all data belonging to year 2020.

View for external Access (The ‘8’ View) for aDSOs in BW/4HANA 2.0 Mixed modelling

In this blog post, I would focus on some of the key aspects of the generated view for external access  or the external SAP HANA SQL View for aDSOs in BW/4HANA 2.0 by a use case scenario. The view is generated with naming convention as following : /BIC (namespace)/A<technical name of the aDSO>8.

We are all well familiar with the below generated tables of aDSOs : (depending on the type of particular aDSO they are relevant)

/BIC/A<technical name of the aDSO>1 : Inbound Table for aDSO.

/BIC/A<technical name of the aDSO>2 : Active Data Table for aDSO.

/BIC/A<technical name of the aDSO>3 : Change Log Table for aDSO.

SAP S/4HANA Business Partner Toolset (BDT) at Business Partner

This blog is relevant for all releases working with Business Partner, meaning ECC 6.0 onwards. Main focus is SAP S/4HANAon-premise and private cloud edition, which is the most relevant working with Business Partner.

Introduction

What is the BDT?

BDT stands for “Business Data Toolset” and is a central tool for maintaining master data and simple transactional data. In this context I will focus on Business Partner transaction and Business Partner Relationship.

Hands-On Tutorial: Leverage SAP HANA Machine Learning in the Cloud through the Predictive Analysis Library

The hard truth is that many machine learning projects fail to get set into production. It takes time and real effort to move from a machine learning model to a real business application. This is due to many different reasons, for example:

1. Limited data access

2. Poor data quality

3. Small computing power

4. No version control

Partitioning Data Volumes for HANA DB performance improvement

Partitioning Data Volumes

Below is a simple question and answer format to understand the usage of data volume partitioning ,how it helps in improving over all HANA DB read and write performance and how this is different from data volume striping

1. What is data volume partitioning? How does it add performance advantage over default setup? Since when it is available?

Data volumes on the Indexserver can be partitioned so that read and write operations can run in parallel with increased data throughput. Also, the HANA startup time will benefit from this feature because the data throughput will increase massively, depending on the number and performance of the additional disks or volumes