An overview of XSA commands for beginners

Overview:

In this article I'll try to explain the expected outcome of XSA commands when executed in Linux environment via command line (xs cli). This blog is aimed at helping understand the xs commands. At first, I also faced the similar dilemma of how XS command works and what is expected outcome. So learning by my experience, sharing most commonly used commands which you can easily use to understand and monitor xs too.

Pre-requisite:

1. OS level access via <sid>adm on HANA DB host

2. User credentials of xsa_admin

XSA – NodeJS

Introduction

In the fifth and final part of our XSA blog series, we will be looking at the exciting topic of NodeJS. What functions does NodeJS offer under XSA? How can existing models be expanded? When (and why) should NodeJS be used with native HANA models? We aim to answer these questions and more with our sample model.

In the first blog, we have already seen that HANA XSA consists of many more services than was the case with the classic XSC environment. NodeJS plays a central role in this regard.

SAP HANA XS Advanced Administration, Deployment and Operations

Many SAP Customers started using XS Advanced and there were several questions on how to deploy or where to deploy and what are the consideration for choosing any of those approached. Based on my experience with various customers I tried to address some key topics in this blog to consolidate information from various sources of documentations

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:

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

How to build and deploy a new Hana application in five minutes

Having worked with all the various SAP offerings around Hana development, the speed and ease of development were never satisfying. Therefore I am promoting a slightly different approach here.

Goal

My customers wanted to create a Hana application. So they needed the table definitions, deploy that table, load it with initial data and then wrap an UI5 application around. Finally maintain the user authentication, specify authorizations down to the row level security and move all to production.

SAP HANA Upgrade from 1.0 to 2.0, project options.

In the recent few months, there were several questions about HANA 2.0 upgrade in the forums. Some developers thought that, it is a big change and lot of things get changed with that. It is not true though in all cases. In this blog, I am writing about the options generally available while doing the upgrade project to 2.0.

If it is just a database upgrade, then It is fairly a simple process which is taken care by basis/Admin team, leaving modelers/developers with no specific task to be done during this process.

Hana Development – Where are you going?

I have a question for you: Are you happy with the SAP Hana development tools?

If not, what can be done about it? I have a proposal…and would ask for your help

In case you find that an interesting thought, please comment, add your own ideas and requirements, spread the word, like it,… any help is appreciated. Without you, the idea will not progress.

Flowgraphs in XSA (express edition H2SPS04)

Recently I was looking into flowgraphs in HANA 2 XSA SPS04. Since I have background in XS, HANA Modeling, and SAP BODS, I thought this may be an easy exercise to achieve.

Before getting into the solution, let’s see what is a flowgraph? A flow graph is the diagram representation of some logic executed with 0 or more filters (input params) in order to get some output.

SAP HANA 2.0 SPS03 on HANA Express – The (very good) first impressions

There are so many new features that I do not even know where to start! I have been playing with these for the last weeks and updating tutorials on XS Advanced. But I had to contain my excitement and  wait until everybody else could get their copy.

There are plenty of very cool features released in SAP HANA, express edition 2.0 SPS03, some are at plain sight and some not. This is my own recollection of the some of them.

Develop a full-stack multi module business application(MTA) by using java as middle-ware.

In this blog, I will explain the step by step process to create a multi module business application(MTA) by using java as the middle-ware component with the help of SAP Web IDE full-stack and this application will be deployed onto the Cloud Foundry trail account.

Functionality of the Application :- Here I am going to display the list of employees of an organization.

Upgrading HANA XSA & WebIDE + SSL Configuration

Backup

First backup all your existing XSA projects to Git and/or export the mta archives.

Obtaining the Software

It’s easy to forget exactly what’s been installed, so I have captured here the pieces I needed.

XSA Accessing Remote Sources & External Objects (Schemas, etc)

When developing with XSA and the WebIDE you will likely need to access existing database objects, schemas, tables, remote sources or other objects from an HDI Container. This configuration has been captured before by Christophe Gilde, but the process has evolved with the latest feature release of the WebIDE (4.3.63 for HANA 2 SPS3).

Integrating SAP HANA XSA with Microsoft Office 365 Sharepoint Excel using Microsoft Graph API and NodeJS

I would like to show how to read data from Microsoft Office 365 using Microsoft Graph API and NodeJS and then write this data into SAP HANA XSA tables.  Our scenario requirement was to pull data from Excel files on Sharepoint on Microsoft Office 365 and write this data to SAP HANA XSA container tables.  We wanted to use the SAP HANA File Adapter which has a section for Sharepoint Configuration.  However, the Excel adapter as of HANA 2.0 SPS 3 can only connect to Sharepoint 2013 on premise systems and not Sharepoint on the Microsoft Office 365 Cloud.  So we had to come up with an approach to address this requirement and develop it.  This Blog describes the approach which will hopefully help other folks needing to accomplish this type of scenarios for integrating Microsoft Office 365 data with SAP HANA XSA .  There will be another Blog that describes how to trigger our custom developed NodeJS application from a virtual procedure through the file adapter through SAP HANA Smart Data Integration (SDI) layer.

Develop a full-stack multi module business application(MTA) by using java as middle-ware

In this blog, I will explain the step by step process to create a multi module business application(MTA) by using java as the middle-ware component with the help of SAP Web IDE full-stack and this application will be deployed onto the Cloud Foundry trail account.

Functionality of the Application :- Here I am going to display the list of employees of an organization.

Create Time-Related Tables and Generate Time Data in SAP HANA XSA Platform

Introduction

Time data is necessary almost in any kind of data manipulation process, as well as adding time-dimension to the calculation views. So, ways to go for the time-dimension has changed a bit with the release of SAP HANA XSA Platform. In this blog post, you’ll see how to create time-related tables if required, and generate time data through the steps on SAP WEB IDE.

Upgrading HANA XSA & WebIDE

Obtaining the Software

It’s easy to forget exactly what’s been installed, so I have captured here the pieces I needed.

Search Words	Description	Filename (as at 11-Sept-2018)
EXTAPPSER	Extended App Services – XSA server binaries	EXTAPPSER00P_88-70001316.SAR
HRTT	HANA Run Time Tools, required for WebIDE	XSACHRTT06_62-70002322.ZIP
XSACMONITOR	XSA Monitoring, required for WebIDE	XSACMONITORING06_5-70002324.ZIP
WEBIDE	SAP WEBIDE 2	XSACSAPWEBIDE03_6-80002257.ZIP

Accessing Data using REST APIs with Python on XSA

My previous blogs have been focused on setting up Python on HANA XSA, connecting applications to HANA Databases, and configuring security and routing settings for applications. In this blog, I am going to delve deeper into accessing a HANA Database within a Python application and creating REST APIs to query data.

Getting Started with Python on SAP HANA XSA

Currently, XSA only distributes a build pack for Python while the runtime needs to be installed manually by the developer. This is different from Node.js and Java for which XSA provides runtime as well. Similarly, the SAP Web IDE for SAP HANA, the main development IDE for XSA, only supports Java and Node.js development. All Python development needs to be done and deployed through command line interface (CLI).

Angular 2 on HANA XSA

From the day I heard SAP HANA will support Node.js, I was curious to experiment what all we can develop on HANA using the new platform. Just few days before I was able to run Angular 2 apps on HANA XSA and thought of sharing the same. So lets start with the prerequisites.

General Availability of SAP HANA XS Advanced Cockpit

The new release of SAP HANA 2.0 SPS03 is around the corner and we are excited to explain our new features. In this blog, we are specifically going to look into SAP HANA XS Advanced Cockpit. This will replace the old SAP HANA XS Advanced Administration Tools, which is announced as “Deprecated” in this release. We will refer to SAP HANA XS Advanced Cockpit as XSA Cockpit and SAP HANA XS Advanced Administration Tools as XSA Admin Tools in this blog. One of the major reasons for us to move to XSA Cockpit is to provide users a consistent, unifying user experience in cloud and on-premise. The XSA Cockpit includes all functionalities of the XSA Admin Tools and it also provides a lot of additional capabilities. The UX and design of the XSA Cockpit is very similar to the SAP Cloud Platform Cockpit to provide users a seamless experience in the cloud and on premise.