Using Data Management Strategies to Simplify the Move to S/4HANA

When it comes to considering the move to S/4HANA, many companies are concerned by the short-term pain points that accompany the transition – even though the future benefits are so clear. While SAP provides many tools and support to make the transition as seamless as possible, many companies prefer to delay the transition and wait and see what the future holds. But “wait and see” is not a very viable business strategy.

Organizations must look for ways to simplify the move to S/4HANA and increase the ROI. The same strategies are applicable when migrating BW and/or Business Suite systems from any legacy database to SAP HANA.

Securing SuccessFactors Extensions on SAP HANA Cloud Platform

Overview

SAP HANA Cloud Platform, extension package for SuccessFactors allows you to extend your SuccessFactors scope with applications running on the platform. The extension package makes it quick and easy for companies to adapt and integrate SuccessFactors cloud applications to their existing business processes, thus helping them maintain competitive advantage, engage their workforce and improve their bottom line.

SAP HANA DB Installation Steps (Part 2)

Steps to follow:

1) Download the SAP HANA media file  from  service market place
2) Place the media file into the some safe directory location
3) Loginto OS level with” root user” or SIDadm
4) Go the directories which you the HANA media file cd <installation medium>/DATA_UNITS/HDB_LCM_LINUX_X86_64
5) Start the SAP HANA platform lifecycle management tool:
6) Find the file and execute “./hdblcm --compontent_root=/DVD"

SAP HANA Installation Steps (Part 1)

Pre-requites:

1) Pre-study and go through the SAP Notes & recommendations
2) Prepare for Hardware requirements
3) Prepare for OS environment like UNIX, SUSE Linux, windows etc...
4) Install Java 1.6 or higher level
5) Install GUI Component
6) Download the HANA database software from service market place

Choosing The Most Effective Approach for Technical Migration to SAP HANA

There are three main technical migration paths to SAP HANA. All of these methods have their own advantages and disadvantages compared to each other. My aim is to provide guidance and recommendation to plan your HANA technical migration using most effective approach for your business case.

Before starting I have to mention that all these methods (except maybe greenfield approach) would require a general technical planning and preparations such as;

• Housekeeping activities, removing obsolete data or archiving old data.
• Collect and update database statistics
• Perform consistency check for tables and dictionary objects.
• Operating system and database related checks and verifications.
• Parameterization for improved performance.

Securing the Communication between SAP HANA Studio and SAP HANA Server through SSL

Pre-requisites:

HANA Server is installed and running
HANA studio is installed in the local system
Access to the HANA server
Putty / WinSCP tools

HANA Server and client without SSL configured:

SAP HANA: Exploring data using SAP Visual Intelligence

SAP Visual Intelligence is SAP’s latest innovation in the SAP BusinessObjects Explorer solution family. It is a desktop-based visualization and data manipulation solution that allows business users to acquire data from a variety of corporate and personal data sources and manipulate without any scripting.
They can then analyze this data, with beautiful visualizations, quickly discovering unique insight that can be easily shared, shaping the business faster than ever before. -- As mentioned by SAP

Let us see what SAP says that we can do with SAP HANA using SAP Visual Intelligence:

SAP HANA Migration from Multi-Node to Single-Node

Environment
SAP HANA Database SPS 08 and higher

Install a New HANA Database as Single-Host System

An SAP HANA database cannot be recovered to an SAP HANA database with a lower software version. The SAP HANA software version used for the recovery must always be the same version or higher than the SAP HANA database used to create the data backup or storage snapshot.

Network Bandwidth Test for HANA Server and Replication Calculation

For network bandwidth testing you need the newest NIPING version for this test, please follow SAP note 799428 to get it.

First start the NIPING server on Secondary server site which you plan to use as data replication target site with the following command:

niping -s -I 0 (the last character is zero, not the letter O)

One can also use the command: niping -s

Upload and Retrieve Image using SAP HANA XS & SAP UI5

One of the most common use case in building XS based Native HANA Application is working with file uploads like image, csv etc.,
In this blog I will explain how to:

1. Use SAPUI5 File Uploader to upload an image
2. Render preview of the uploaded image
3. Save it to HANA DB using a XSJS service.
4. Retrieve the saved image using XSJS service and render it on the UI.

Please note this approach can be applied for any type of file. e.g .csv, xlsx etc.,
Upload an Image using SAPUI5 File Uploader:

HOW TO GENERATE ROW NUMBER OR SEQUENCE NUMBER USING HANA GRAPHICAL CALC VIEW RANK

Created a Table name Country in SAP HANA and have following columns:
COUNTRY_NAME        VARCHAR (50)
COUNTRY_ID                INTEGER

How and why to activate asynchronous queuing of IO requests

Why Asynchronous IO:

Undesired synchronous I/O can have a major impact on the HANA performance, especially restart time and table load time for read I/O as well as savepoint and write transaction commit times for write I/O.

HANA uses asynchronous IO to write to and read from disk. Ideally, asynchronous IO should have a trigger ratio close to zero. A trigger ratio close to 1 indicates asynchronous IO that behaves almost like synchronous IO, that is: triggering an IO request takes just as long as executing it and hence very prone to performance degradation of HANA system. In such cases we need to activate asynchronous IO for a particular file system/path.

My first experiences with the on premise Web IDE for HANA

Project

Creating a XS Advanced (XSA) project is supported by templates, but currently only one template for Multi-Target Application Project exists that simply creates a Multi-Target Application (MTA) Descriptor file. Templates like the Fiori Master Detail Application, that I like because it fits the requirements for many simple out of the box scenarios, are currently missing and the MTA Descriptor file has to be edited manually for the application configuration.

How to Consume HANA XS Odata in ECC

Introduction:

In this blog we will discuss how can we consume HANA XS-Odata services in ECC system. In this scenario we will set up an RFC connection between HANA and ECC system and the XS Odata services can be consumed. The data coming from the XS-Odata services can be populated in an internal table for further processing.

Prerequisites:

• This scenario has to be implemented in ECC system.
• An RFC connection should exist between HANA and ECC.

The Best-run Organizations Prefer SAP HANA

Only recently, a German television magazine unveiled that no others than the U.S. security agencies CIA and NSA are using software solutions based on the SAP HANA® platform. This is especially remarkable since most people would expect that particularly U.S. authorities prefer a database made in the U.S. Well – they don’t, for obvious reasons. SAP HANA is a database platform that is currently unparalleled. It enables companies and organizations to analyze large amounts of data, both structured and unstructured, in real time. And consequently, more and more of these companies and organizations replace their legacy databases with SAP HANA, realizing incredible cost and performance benefits while simplifying their IT infrastructure as well as exploring innovative business processes and new business models at the same time. Let me present just a few:

Configuration and perfroming backups using netbackup for SAP HANA

The NetBackup for SAP HANA Agent integrates the backint interface for SAP HANA along with the backup and the recovery management capabilities of NetBackup. The software works in single as well as multi-node environments. Below are the list of activites that you need to perfrom in the HANA Studio for netbackup configuration.

1. Create hdbbackint soft link from /usr/sap/<SID>/SYS/global/hdb/opt/hdbbackint to /usr/openv/NetBackup/bin/hdbbackint_script for every database instance.

2. The parameter file (initSAP.utl) must be specified for data in the SAP HANA database instance configuration. To specify the parameter file, go to
Instance->Configuration-> global.ini > data_backup_parameter_file.

Introducing the new SAP HANA capture and replay tool, available with SAP HANA SPS12

Testing challenges

Testing application workload can be a huge effort for users, developers and consultants alike. Also, things do not get easier on a large scale, especially for moving from one revision or SPS of SAP HANA to another.

The common approach to this is using customized scripts for database access or executing test scenarios in client applications. Of course, developing such scenarios and test cases is a large and therefore very costly development effort – all of it just to ensure the solution still works correctly with the new SAP HANA software.

For regression testing a new SAP HANA SPS across a whole system landscape with multiple application stacks the complexity increases even more since now the interoperation between SAP HANA and the various client applications or reporting tools needs to be tested. The outcome of all this effort are hand-crafted tests that may only resemble the actual workload to a certain degree.

Fail-Safe Operation of SAP HANA®: SUSE Extends Its High-Availability Solution

“SAP customers invest in SAP HANA” is the conclusion reached by a recent market study carried out by Pierre Audoin Consultants (PAC). In Germany alone, half of companies expect SAP HANA to become the dominant database platform in the SAP environment. In many cases, the “SAP Business Suite® powered by SAP HANA” scenario is already being discussed in concrete terms.

Naturally, SUSE is also accommodating this development by providing SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications – the recommended and supported operating system for SAP HANA. In close collaboration with SAP and hardware partners, therefore, SUSE will provide two resource agents for customers to ensure the high availability of SAP HANA system replications.

HANA Rules Framework (HRF)

SAP HANA Rules Framework provides tools that enable application developers to build solutions with automated decisions and rules management services, implementers and administrators to set up a project/customer system, and business users to manage and automate business decisions and rules based on their organizations' data.
In daily business, strategic plans and mission critical tasks are implemented by a countless number of operational decisions, either manually or automated by business applications. These days - an organization's agility in decision-making becomes a critical need to keep up with dynamic changes in the market.
SAP HANA Rules Framework is already integrated with many SAP solutions and it enables their end users to enter business logic easily in different business processes (see some samples below).

HANA Monitoring Handy SQL's

Monitoring Memory Usage

Used Memory
The total amount of memory in use by SAP HANA is referred to as its Used Memory. This is the most precise indicator of the amount of memory that the SAP HANA database uses at any time

When used:  To understand the current used memory in HANA when HANA alerts shows usage greater than licensed memory. Understanding memory usage by components will help in troubleshooting and perform necessary memory clean up actions.