Enter SAP Enterprise Cloud

Last week, SAP announced the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud service. SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud empowers you to deploy SAP Business Suite, SAP NetWeaver BW, and custom HANA applications to support real-time business. Learn more in the blog by executive board memberVishal Sikka and watch the replay of the press event.Then read Siva Darivemula’s blog Adding a New On-Ramp to the HANA Highway for more insight. May 8, 2013

SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud: “Instant Value without Compromise”

SVP Mark Yolton describes what the new offering can do for customers, shares his take on the announcement as well as some early reactions from the media. His blog is also filled with HANA resources. May 8, 2013

SAP HANA Cloud Integration Now Available

SAP HANA Cloud Integration, now available for customers and partners, is an integration platform hosted in SAP HANA Cloud that facilitates the integration of business processes spanning across different departments, organizations, or companies. Mariana Mihaylova explains and provides resources in this document. May 8, 2013

Cloudy on the terminology? Check out the blog by Bjoern Goerke in which he clarifies recent branding around cloud.

New SAP HANA Development Platform Training as Massive Open Online Course (MOOC)

Register for a new online course: "Introduction to Software Development on SAP HANA." Over six weeks’ time, you’ll get an overview of the native programming capabilities of SAP HANA. Dr. Markus Schwarz, SVP SAP Education, says, "We want to give learners choice. With the new course we can reach even a broader audience." May 1, 2013

The Evolution of HANA One: More Than Just HANA Hosted in a Public Cloud

SAP Mentor Richard Hirsch comments on a recent SAPinsider publication about HANA One. May 1, 2013

SLT Suggestions for SAP HANA

In what he describes as a “brainstorming blog,” Thomas Krojzl writes about his ideas on how SLT replication could be improved. Don’t worry, he’s open to criticism. Seems like a good time to like it, rate it, and comment away! April 26, 2013

Bipedal Process and Data Intelligence.... Stop Hopping.... RUN!

The fact that we’re living in the age of big data is no surprise at this point, but according to Alan Rickayzen, “the age of process intelligence has just started.” Find out what he means, where HANA comes into the picture, and how solution experts and process operators and process owners are the big benefactors of SAP Operational Process Intelligence. April 26, 2013

Why Users Need SSO in SAP HANA

With Single Sign On (SSO), users can directly log in from any front-end application and access the SAP HANA database without providing login credentials again. Read more highly rated blogs on SAP HANA. This blog by Kiran Musunuru gives you details on setting up SSO with SAP HANA using Kerberos. April 26, 2013

New Publications from SAPinsider:

A Look Under the Hood of SAP HANA

Get look at some of the key components of the SAP HANA platform and the features and functions that make the it compelling for developers.

SAPinsider: SAP HANA One Illuminates New Possibilities

Learn about the instant deployment option that facilitates smaller SAP HANA projects and applications that are not easily accommodated by on-premise system procurement cycles. April 26, 2013

Pairing the Power of SAP HANA with the Innovative Agility of a Startup

Learn more about the Startup Focus program, how to get involved, and what it means for SAP customers. April 26, 2013

Best Practices for SAP HANA Data Loads

As SAP Mentor John Appleby says, “you can take the best technology in the world, create a bad design, and it will work badly. Yes, even SAP HANA can be slow.” With that in mind, check out his best practices for HANA data loading. April 10, 2013

Performance Guidelines for ABAP Development on the SAP HANA Database

If you’re an experienced ABAP developer, you’re probably familiar with the classic performance guidelines for using Open SQL. This begs the question of what changes are there to the guidelines in the context of SAP HANA. Eric Westenberger tackles that question.  April 10, 2013

Experience the Magic: How to Setup Your Own ABAP on HANA in the Cloud

Are you an ABAP developer who can’t wait to explore the intricacies of ABAP on HANA coding? Do you want to set up a sandbox environment where you can try out things such as consuming HANA Calculation Views or Stored Procedures from ABAP programs, and learn how to accelerate your ABAP applications with HANA or build entirely new ones? Then SAP Mentor Thorsten Franz wrote this for you. April 10, 2013

Tame BIG Processes with SAP Operational Process Intelligence, Powered by SAP HANA

Read the three-part series by Harshavardhan Jegadeesan, in which he walks through "big processes," the challenges they pose, and how SAP Operational Process Intelligence, powered by SAP HANA can help businesses overcome them. Then see how to test drive #SAPOPInt in this post. March 22, 2013

Get your hands on this HANA stuff:

• HANA One - Get $120 to start your experience with the SAP HANA platform, available in the cloud.
• HANA Academy - Watch more than 250 videos answering your what, why, and how questions about SAP HANA.
• SAP Operational Process Intelligence powered by HANA - Test drive it today.

March 13, 2013

Migrating Java Open-Source Application from Oracle to SAP HANA

The purpose of this document is to guide the process of migrating OLTP systems from a source ORACLE database to a target SAP HANA database. The Java Open-Source mvnForm is used in this guide to simulate the example of an OLTP system on the source Oracle database. March 7, 2013

When SAP HANA met R - What's new?

Last year’s ”When SAP HANA met R - First kiss” blog has some people wondering what’s new the integration of the SAP HANA database with R. Blag responds in his recent blog. March 4, 2013

Webinar: SAP Business Suite Powered by SAP HANA

On January 10, 2013, SAP announced the availability of the SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA – built to deliver an integrated family of business applications unifying analytics and transactions into a single in-memory platform. Join an exclusive webcast on March 14, at 15:00 CET and learn how to become a real-time business.

Engage with SAP HANA through Hours of Free Videos and Projects

Explore the SAP HANA Academy and watch more than 250 videos answering your what, why, and how questions about SAP HANA.March 4, 2013

Uncovering the Value of SAP BW Powered by HANA: Answering the Second Question

When Suite runs on HANA, BW runs on HANA, and assorted data marts run on HANA - what would be different for a business user? After talking to several customers, Vijay Vijayasankar thinks it’s the "ease of answering the second question" that is the most value adding scenario for a business user. What is your "second question"? March 4, 2013

Clear the Process Fog with SAP Operational Process Intelligence

Learn about this new SAP offering designed to improve your operational efficiency. Check out the overview video on YouTube and share your thoughts on therelated blog by Peter McNulty. February 21, 2013

Say cheese... on taking snapshots with SAP HANA

In this detailed blog, Lars Breddemann shows how to take a snapshot of your SAP HANA instance. February 21, 2013

Fast is Not a Number

You might call it a constructive rant, but why not ask the difficult questions? Jim Spath - SAP Mentor, SCN forum moderator, ASUG volunteer, employee of a company that runs SAP – does. February 21, 2013

The OLAP Compiler in BW on SAP HANA

Thomas Zurek blogs about a functionality he considers one of the “crown jewels” of BW on HANA.February 21, 2013

SAP HANA Certification Pathways

In this comprehensive blog, Vishal Soni shares his organization’s plans which outline paths to SAP HANA certification for technical consultants and application consultants.February 18, 2013

Harness Insight from Hadoop with MapReduce and Text Data Processing Using SAP Data Services and SAP HANA

This white paper, developed at SAP Co-Innovation Lab,  explores how IT organizations can use solutions from SAP and our partners to harness the value of large volumes of data stored in Hadoop, identify salient entities from unstructured textual data, and combine it with structured data in SAP HANA to leverage meaningful information in real-time. February 13, 2013

New SAP TV Videos on SME Customers Using SAP HANA

Michael Nuesslein of SAP TV announces two new SAP HANA game-changer videos worth checking out. January 28, 2013

SAP on HANA, and Pushdown for All: News about ABAP's Adventurous Relationship with the Database

Business Suite on HANA wasn't all news to this SAP Mentor, but the January 10 announcement came with some "extremely new and noteworthy" information to Thorsten Franz, such as a shift in the ABAP programming model. January 21, 2013

The Business Suite on HANA: The Announcement and What this Means for Customers

Besides providing an overview of the January 10 announcement, SAP Mentor and SCN Moderator Luke Marson outlines customer benefits and his thoughts on what it all means. Of course there are still questions, as summarized in Carsten Nitschke’s candidly-titled “What I did not learn” blog. Don’t miss the discussion that follows.

As far as what’s next, SAP Mentor Richard Hirsch“connects the dots” and suggests the next big play for HANA. January 17, 2013

2013 - The Year of the SAP Database

With the incredible success of SAP HANA over the last 18 months and a greatly expanded database and technology portfolio, SAP is poised to surge ahead in the database market. SAP Mentor John Appleby shares his thoughts on why 2013 will be a pivotal year. January 3, 2013

SAP TechEd Sessions on SAP HANA

What principles guide SAP’s platform and infrastructure decisions? Watch Introduction to Our Technology Strategy and Road Map to learn about the "big bets" that SAP is making in the technology game. Then learn about Integrating SAP HANA into Your Landscape through the intelligent use of in-memory technology. You’ll gain valuable insight with this interview: From ABAPer to MOBILEr: The Evolution of SAP Developers, where SAP Mentor DJ Adams talks about developer evolution with SAP HANA, Java, Eclipse, and Cloud. Watch more sessions on SAP HANA. January 10, 2013

It’s Here: SAP Business Suite, Powered by SAP HANA

SAP just announced availability of the SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA. SCN’s own Siva Darivemula summarizes the announcement, including a blog post by SAP CTO Vishal Sikka and overview video. January 10, 2013

What's New in SAP HANA SPS05

Following the model of his very successful "What's New" blogs from his SAP NetWeaver Portal days, Daniel Wroblewski summarizes the new features of SAP HANA SPS05 in this blog. See the related post by Lucas Sparvieri about the SAP HANA Text Analysis capabilities of SPS05. January 3, 2013

Meet the Distinguished Engineers

SAP HANA is the fastest growing product in SAP's history, with over 400 customers after just 12 months, and there will be an unprecedented demand for SAP HANA resources. With this comes the need to understand the level of experience of a HANA engineer and their areas of expertise. The Distinguished Engineer program is an SAP-sponsored, community-led effort to address this perceived skills gap in the HANA technical community, and to recognize those with a high level of technical skills, as well as embracing those who are learning and are on their way to gaining skills. Learn more. January 3, 2013

New from SAPinsider Magazine:

Optimizing ABAP for SAP HANA: SAP's 3-Step Approach - In this article, you'll learn SAP's three-step approach to optimize SAP NetWeaver Application Server (SAP NetWeaver AS) ABAP for the SAP HANA database.

Build Solutions Powered by SAP HANA to Transform Your Business - Read how the SAP Custom Development organization is helping customers build business-critical solutions powered by SAP HANA. January 3, 2013

2012

HANA Videos from SAP TechEd Live

Replay these interviews from Madrid for a variety of insights into SAP HANA:

• SAP HANA Petascale Perfomance Test
• Developer Deep Dive on SAP HANA, Part II
• SAP HANA Cloud - Where In-Memory Computing Meets the Cloud
• In the Cloud and on SAP HANA with SAP Business One
• How SAP HANA Helps Startups Achieve the Impossible
• How Startups are Transforming their Businesses by Building their Solutions on SAP HANA

Find more interviews in the catalog of HANA interviews from Las Vegas. November 28, 2012

SAP HANA One Innovative App Contest

Build your most innovative app on HANA One in AWS Cloud. Register by December 12, 2012. Learn more. December 3, 2012

More HANA from SAP TechEd Live!

Replay these interviews from Madrid for a variety of insights into SAP HANA:

• SAP HANA Petascale Perfomance Test
• Developer Deep Dive on SAP HANA, Part II
• SAP HANA Cloud - Where In-Memory Computing Meets the Cloud
• In the Cloud and on SAP HANA with SAP Business One
• How SAP HANA Helps Startups Achieve the Impossible
• How Startups are Transforming their Businesses by Building their Solutions on SAP HANA

Find more interviews in the catalog of HANA interviews from Las Vegas. November 28, 2012

New Space: SAP NetWeaver BW powered by SAP HANA

Follow the new space dedicated to releases of SAP NetWeaver BW on SAP HANA. November 26, 2012

How to Configure SAP HANA for CTS

Learn how to use the Change and Transport System (CTS) together with SAP HANA. November 26, 2012

SAP HANA Installation Guide – Trigger-Based Data Replication

This guide details the installation and configuration of trigger-based replication for SAP HANA – the SAP Landscape Transformation Replication Server.November 26, 2012

The Road to HANA for Software Developers

Developer Whisperer Juergen Schmerder published this helpful guide for developers interested in HANA to help find their way through the jungle of documents out there. October 31, 2012

Preparing for HANA: How to Achieve SAP Certified Technology Associate Certification

How do you prepare for the actual certification? In this blog, SAP Mentor Tom Cenens provides some helpful information on the certification and how to pass. October 31, 2012

Hit “Replay” on SAP HANA! Visit SAP TechEd Online

The SAP TechEd Live studio in Las Vegas featured interviews about SAP HANA One (productive HANA on AWS), SAP HANA Academy, RDS for HANA, the HANA Distinguished Engineer program, how startups are using HANA, and a deep dive on SAP HANA development. Check outall these and more interviews. October 26, 2012

SAP HANA Academy: Watch, Follow, and Learn SAP HANA from SAP and Ecosystem Partners Experts

This week at SAP TechEd, we announced the launch of the SAP HANA Academy. Access videos and exercises about everything from security, to working with data in SAP HANA Studio and SAP BusinessObjects Data Services, to integrating SAP HANA with Mobile or Analytics. Also, see the related SAP TechEd Online video. October 23, 2012

Better Choice – SAP BW on SAP HANA

You think you know databases? Think again. Watch the short animated video to see how you can make a better choice with SAP BW on HANA. Learn how you can better handle your exploding data volume, and why your business can benefit from real time data analysis. October 23, 2012

Join the first Google+ HANA Hangout!

Hang out with SAP HANA experts on Monday, October 29 at 9 am PT for a live, streamed chat about SAP HANA and big data. Participants include Aiaz Kazi, Head of Technology & Innovation Marketing for SAP, and Amit Sinha, Head of Database & Technology Marketing at SAP and special guest Irfan Khan, CTO of Sybase. October 26, 2012

What Customers Say About SAP HANA

“Fujitsu and SAP’s  history of co-innovation and collaboration have now provided both very large and small customers with a scalable in memory appliance that can quickly be implemented to dramatically increase data processing and real time information analytics for decision making,” says Rolf Schwirz, CEO Fujitsu Technology Solutions. Read more in SAP In-Memory Computing - Procter & Gamble Customer Testimonial, SAP HANA Helps Federal Mogul to Improve Performance, SAP HANA Helps Booan Run Better, Hilti Customer Testimonial and Charite Improves Lives with SAP HANA. October 5, 2012

First Experience with ABAP for HANA – Evolution or Revolution?

Check out this excellent blog by SAP Mentor Tobias Trapp, and contribute to the new, dedicated ABAP for HANA space.

Read more about how co-innovation among SAP and SAP Mentors enabled optimization of the ABAP platform for HANA in Sanjay Khanna’sblogAll for One and HANA for All. October 3, 2012

With All the Facts and Information Readily Available, Why Is It So Tough for Some to Speak Truth About SAP HANA?

Mark Yolton, SVP Communities & Social Media at SAP, put together this nice collection of great blogs, videos, articles, and other content that will help you understand the essence and the truth about SAP HANA. Top picks include: What Oracle Won't Tell You about SAP HANA by Steve Lucas, EVP Database & Technology at SAP, and Puneet Suppal's SAP HANA and the Pretenders. October 3, 2012

Turbocharge Your Applications with SAP HANA (Webinar Recording)

In this recording, learn how to add new revenue streams and monetize in-memory computing with new services and offerings, turbocharge your applications with SAP for OEM Partners, and reduce administration costs and do ETL, materialization, aggregation, and summarizing in just one step.

Video Blog: The State of SAP HANA - Debating Killer Apps and Skills Needs

To commemorate the first year anniversary of HANA's General Availability, Jon Reed taped this special Google Hangout with fellow SAP Mentors John Appleby, Vijay Vijayasankar, and Harald Reiter. September 14, 2012

How to Analyze Who Has Access to Particular Objects

Following his blogs on how to analyze security relations in SAP HANA system, SAP Mentor Tomas Krojzl looks at authorization relationship between users and objects. September 14, 2012

New Publication: A Storage Advisor for Hybrid-Store Databases

This paper, published in the Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment by SAP Research, proposes a storage advisor tool that supports database administrators in deciding between row and column data management. September 14, 2012

Spotfire on HANA (and a bit of a comparison)

After a previous blog “Tableau on HANA,” Ronald Konijnenburg of Logica Nederland B.V. got curious again about how a similar third-party application would behave when connecting it to HANA. September 7, 2012

From Online Gaming to Genome Analysis SAP HANA Creates New Business Opportunities

Technology itself does not give your business an edge—how you use that technology does. In her latest blog post, SAP’s Ruks Omar introduces the SAP HANA Use Case Repository, where you’ll find numerous applications for SAP HANA, and a call to share your use case. September 7, 2012

SAPInsider: SAP HANA is a Journey, Not a Destination

Since its release in 2010, SAP HANA has rapidly evolved from an appliance for accelerating analytics to an application platform — and there's still more to come. In this SAPinsider Q&A, hear from Dan Kearnan, Senior Director of Marketing for Data Warehousing and SAP HANA, who discusses this in-memory technology's impressive growth and sheds light on where it's headed. September 7, 2012

Free Course on In-Memory Data Management

Gain deep technical understanding of a dictionary-encoded column-oriented in-memory database and its application in enterprise computing with this new offering from the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI).

The course, guided by Dr. Plattner himself, begins September 3, 2012 and requires about 3 hrs effort per week over 6 weeks. See the course overview on SCN and visit the openHPI web site for complete details. August 14, 2012

Webinar Replay Now Available

Transform Your Business with the Real-Time Power of SAP HANA - According to a study by Oxford Economics, companies that implement real-time systems see an average 21% increase in revenue, and a 19% reduction in IT cost.1 But what does real time really mean? August 24, 2012

Sign up for the August 16 Webinar: Transform Your Business with the Real-Time Power of SAP HANA

This 30-minute webinar focuses on how a real-time in memory data platform can give companies unprecedented and immediate insights into their customers, products, services and operations by enabling the analysis of huge volumes of data from virtually any source -- for improved agility and bottom line performance. August 14, 2012

I'm in a HANA State of Mind

Says SAP Mentor John Appleby, "...because once you start spotting opportunities for SAP HANA, you won't stop until you find ways to disrupt entire industries." August 1, 2012

SAP HANA Startup Forum Day - TLV 2012

Erez Sobol, Head of Technology Ventures at SAP Labs Israel, recaps an exciting day of learning and collaboration centered around big data and SAP technologies as part of the world-wide SAP Startup Focus Program. August 2, 2012

HANA and the Future of Personalized Medicine

Medicine can now be aided by tools capable of processing large volumes of data quickly. HANA is well placed to establish a strong role in the new era of personalized medicine. Mark Heffernan shares some thoughts and observations on the potential for HANA and personalized medicine. July 31, 2012

SAP Hana Code Jam - Why Code in SAP Hana?

SAP Mentor Tammy Powlas shares her experience at the first SAP CodeJam focused exclusively on SAP HANA. July 30, 2012

New Installation/Import - Including Unified Installer -  for SAP NetWeaver BW Powered by SAP HANA

SAP’s Roland Kramer provides guidance for implementing BW on SAP HANA, whether it’s a new installation or an export of an existing system with any DB export. July 27, 2012

Using JPA to Persist Application Data in SAP HANA

This document proposes a solution for using the Java Persistence API framework JPA to persist Java classes in HANA DB. July 18, 2012

Create Your Own Security Monitoring Tool

SAP Mentor Tomas Krojzl of IBM shows how to create a tool that will give you an overview of user role assignments in your SAP HANA system.Part I | Part IIJuly 18, 2012

Real-time Gross-to-Net Profitability Analysis - HANA PoC at COIL

Vistex partnered with SAP and IBM in the SAP Co-Innovation Lab to develop a solution to provide real-time profitability analytics while reducing the overall impact on transactional processing and other business operations. In this blog, Kevin Liu of SAP Co-Innovation Lab introduces the project and resulting white paper.

SAP NetWeaver AS ABAP for HANA

How does ABAP help to leverage the benefits of in-memory database technology? This documentdescribes SAP's vision, strategy, development, and commitment to enable ABAP for SAP HANA.June 25, 2012

Does SAP HANA Replace BW? (Hint: No.) - Part 2

In this part 2 blog, SAP Mentor John Appleby continues where SAP EVP Steve Lucas left off in his original blog post inspired by a series of posts in the Twittersphere. June 25, 2012

Download the SAP HANA Essentials eBook (It's Free!)

In this video blog, SAP HANA expert Jeffrey Word introduces the new book SAP HANA Essentials eBook. June 25, 2012

Announcing the SAP HANA Distinguished Engineer Program

Learn about a new program from SAP that aims to promote and encourage technical expertise in SAP HANA. June 19, 2012

Happy First Birthday, HANA!

On the first birthday of SAP HANA, SAP Mentor Vijay Vijaysankar from IBM reflects on the progress made over the last year and looks forward to challenges and opportunities ahead. June 18, 2012

SAP Insider: Powered by SAP HANA

In this SAPinsider article, Scott Leatherman of SAP explains how value-added resellers, independent software vendors, and systems integration partners are helping companies that have "big data" challenges understand the scale of SAP HANA and identify areas where it can help drive their business forward. June 18, 2012

Get your own SAP HANA DB server on Amazon Web Services

Get your hands on your own HANA DB server using three different image sizes we made available for you. Check out now and create your own HANA@AWS environment and get started with SAP HANA!  June 1, 2012

Happy Birthday to You, HANA!

On Monday, June 18, SAP HANA turns one year old, and we'd like to you to be a part of the celebration. Bay Area residents may join us in Palo Alto, and everyone's welcome to join in on the virtual birthday party. Festivities start at 10 AM Pacific time. June 14, 2012

Understanding Look and Feel of SAP HANA STUDIO

In this document, Krishna Tangudu discusses the basic navigation for the SAP HANA Sandbox system, with an emphasis on the look and feel of the system. May 31, 2012

Rapid Deployment Solution for Banking Powered by SAP HANA Transforms your Business

To help banks to speed up the adoption of SAP HANA, SAP offers Rapid Deployment Solutions for banking. Susanne Knopp highlights them in this recent blog. May 31, 2012

Getting Started with SAP HANA Developer Center

In this short tutorial, SAP Mentor and Development Expert Alvaro Tejada Galindo covers some HANA Developer Center essentials: Creation of a Developer Center account, CloudShare, creation of row and column tables, upload of CSV file to SAP HANA, creation of Stored Procedure, creation of a view, and graphic analysis using SAP HANA Studio own tools. May 9, 2012

Who's Talking About SAP HANA? Find out on this "Conversation Heat Map"

Chris Kim of SAP Global Marketing introduces a tool for visualizing social media conversations around #SAP #HANA. Check it out. May 10, 2012

Explore Use Cases, Quantify Business Value

In these two blogs, SAP Mentor Rukhshaan Omar previews two new decision-making tools she'll be unveiling at SAPPHIRE NOW Orlando: The HANA use case repository and the business value calculator. May 8, 2012

Developer's Journal: ABAP/HANA Connectivity via Secondary Database Connection

Interested in how to access HANA from your ABAP systems? In his edition of the HANA Developer's Journal, Thomas Jung explains how much can be done today when HANA runs as a secondary database for your current ABAP based systems and what development options within the ABAP environment support this  scenario. April 15, 2012

SAP HANA Technical Overview – An Entry Point to Our Revolutionary Chapter

This blog introduces the latest and greatest technical overview white paper for SAP HANA. This essential document provides a general understanding of SAP HANA as of support package 3 (SP03), and covers database administration, deployment scenarios, data load architecture scenarios, and more. 20 April 2012

SAP HANA Scale-Out Performance Test: Blog Commentary

In his blog SAP HANA - Scale Out Performance Test Results - Early Findings, Sam Bhat of United Software provides general guidelines for people interested in considering new database technologies like SAP HANA. Josh Greenbaum (EAC ) summarizes the data from SAP’s latest HANA scalability test in his blog SAP Ups the HANA Challenge following SAP’s April 10 press conference. 20 April 2012

Visit the SAP Newsroom for more news from the April 10 press conference. 11 April 2012

Inside SAP HANA: Optimizing Data Load Performance and Tuning

SAP Mentor John Appleby outlines seven steps and offers insight into the best ways to optimize data models and load performance in SAP HANA. He covers not only optimizing the data model, but testing load parameters and choosing a partition scheme carefully. 4 April, 2012

Back to Featured Content.

Visit SAP at the Consumer Goods Sales & Marketing Summit 2013

"Datatopia: From Big Data to Meaningful Customer Dialogue"

June 3 - 5, 2013 in New York

We hope you can join SAP at this compelling event at the Roosevelt Hotel in the heart of Midtown New York City. Consumer Goods Technology (CGT) has set a complete agenda full of networking opportunities and educational sessions covering topics like mobility, consumer trends, new marketing strategies, and trade promotion optimization. Schedule a meeting today with SAP representatives. Haven’t registered for the summit yet? Visit the event Web site to register and find out more.

Webcast: Leveraging promotion optimization to improve collaboration with your retailer partners

Sponsored by SAP, hosted by Progressive Grocer and Retail Leader

DATE: Thursday, May 23, 2013

TIME: 11:00 am ET/8:00 am PT

Learn about the opportunities that exist for CP companies to use promotion optimization to improve ROI on promotions while maximizing revenue, volume and profitability for both consumer products companies and their retailer partners. Register.

SAP HANA Use Cases

This space should inform you about current use cases. To find more details about how HANA can support the Consumer Products Industry click on the use case headline.

Real-time Sales and Operations Planning

It is possible to use SAP HANA for Strategic Demand and Supply Scenarios in Real-time. So as a result there will be a better visibilty into planned and actual demand information across product channel and geography dimensions.

Building Effective Promotions With Sentiment Intelligence

This use case demonstrates that market trends and customer perception of brands and products can be analyzed by by using the SAP rapid-deployment solution for sentiment intelligence with SAP HANA.

View more consumer products use cases...

June 4 - Essar Group Chose SAP HANA. Find Out Why

June 6 - Usha International Limited Chose SAP HANA. Find Out Why

June 6 - SAP HANA Cloud Integration (ASUG)

June 11 - Optimizing Data Services and Information Steward for SAP HANA (ASUG)

June 19- Driving Big Value From Big Processes with SAP Operational Process Intelligence, Powered by SAP HANA

See the the full HANA Webcast Calendar.

This document is prepared based on version SAP HANA 1.0 SPS 05 revision 46.

In part 1 of HANA Password security, we seen how to view the different password policy parameters and how to change them. Also for the parameter 9 of the password policy (password_layout) we can enforce the user to include one upper-case letter, one lower-case letter, one numeric and optionally one special character in his/her password. If you have not read this document before, I suggest you to have a look, as the part 2 document is related to my previous one. Here is the link: http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-41573 

Even though the user includes all these rules in his/her password, we can add some additional rules to password.

Scenario: The organization came up with certain rules to implement in password policy as mentioned below:

Rule 1:

• A password should not contain a specific word which are easy to guess for other users, like sap or hana.
• Also the above words should not be part of the password, like sapWorld1 or Spshana5
• Also should not be case sensitive of that restricted word, like SapWorld1 or SpsHana5

Rule 2:

• The password should not contain user name.
  

If any of these points of rule 1 and 2 gets satisfied, then the system should not accept the user password.

In this document, we will be implementing the above scenario.

If you have read my previous document then you might got some idea whether it is possible to implement at-least one of the above rules? The answer is no. With the help of password policy parameters ( of total 11), it is not possible to implement the above rule(s).

In HANA studio, SAP has provided some standard schema's and one of them which is relevant to our scenario is _SYS_SECURITY schema which contains only 1 table "_SYS_PASSWORD_BLACKLIST" and has three columns:

1. BLACKLIST_TERM
2. CHECK_PARTIAL_PASSWORD
3. CHECK_CASE_SENSITIVE

and when you do the data preview for this table, it will be empty by default for new instance as shown below, provided if you have the SELECT privilege on this table.

Now with the help of this table, it is simple to implement our rule(s) of password policy by just inserting our policy terms (or simply record).

In order to Insert into or Delete from this table, the user should have INSERT and DELETE privileges on either the table _SYS_PASSWORD_BLACKLIST or the entire schema _SYS_SECURITY.

Now we need two insert statements into this table. One to meet the requirement for the word sap and the other for the word hana.

INSERT INTO _SYS_SECURITY._SYS_PASSWORD_BLACKLIST VALUES ('sap', 'TRUE', 'FALSE');
INSERT INTO _SYS_SECURITY._SYS_PASSWORD_BLACKLIST VALUES ('hana', 'TRUE', 'FALSE');

In SQLEditor execute the above statements and do the Data Preview.

Now our new Rule 1 of password blacklist is in effective regardless of how the password layout and minimal password length are defined in corresponding parameters of password policy (part 1 document) . Lets test this rule by creating a new user, say USER1 and give password in such a way that it matches with our new policy password terms i.e. say enter password as sapTest1 (which contains the restricted word sap). When we try to save the new user, it should throw an error, something like this:

So far Rule 1 implemented successfully

Now coming to Rule 2 which says password should not contain the user name.

Before creating the user first we need to insert a record with user name in BLACKLIST table as

insert into "_SYS_SECURITY"."_SYS_PASSWORD_BLACKLIST" values('user1','TRUE','FALSE');

Now the Rule 2 is also in effective and lets test this by creating the user USER1 with password as User1234.

If you enter the password as User4321, it will accept as password does not contain the user name USER1.

Disadvantage: If you create another user, say USER2 then all the above rules we created will apply and USER2 will also not able to use password such as User1234, though the password User1234 does not contain the user User2

This can be made better if we can check the password blacklist against the particular user only, while creating the new user or modifying the password of existing user for Rule 2. If you have the solution for this then I would be glad to know.

That's it we are done with implementing password policy for a given simple scenario.

Thank You.

Backup and Recovery of HANA Database

For the need of optimal performance, the SAP HANA database holds the data in memory.

During normal database operation, data is automatically saved from memory to disk at regular SAVEPOINTS. Additionally, all data changes are recorded in the redo log. The redo log is saved from memory to disk with each committed database transaction. After a improper shutdown, the database can be restarted like any disk-based database, and it returns to its last consistent state by replaying the redo log since the last SAVEPOINT.

This SAVEPOINT consists of 3 Stages:

Stage A

• All modified pages are determined that are not yet written to disk. The

SAVE POINT coordinator triggers writing of these pages.

Stage B:

• The write operations for phase 3 are prepared.

• A consistent change lock is acquired → no write operations are allowed.

• All pages are determined that were modified during phase 1 and written

to a temporary buffer.

• List of open transactions is retrieved.

• Row store information for uncommitted changes made during phase 1 is

written to disk.

• Current log position is determined (log position from which logs must be

read during restart).

• Change lock is released.

Stage C

• All data is written to disk. Changes are allowed again during this phase.

• Temporary buffers created in phase 2.

• List of open transactions

• Row store check point is invoke

• Log queue is flushed up to the SAVEPOINT log position

• Restart record is written (containing e.g. the SAVEPOINT log position)

While SAVEPOINTs and log writing protect your data against power failures,

SAVEPOINTs do not help if the persistent storage itself is damaged.

Database backup can be done manually and also can be scheduled to run automatically

Manual backups are done through

                SAP HANA Studio

                DBA COCKPIT

                SQL COMMAND

Scheduling  can be done

                Using DBA Calendar in DBA COCKPIT

                Using script (though SQL Interface)

Performing Backups

You can specify whether data and log backups are written to the file system or

using third-party backup tools. The Backint for SAP HANA interface performs

all the actions needed to write the backup data to external storage. The backup

tools communicate directly with the SAP HANA database through the Backint for

SAP HANA interface.

Backint can be configured both for data backups and for log backups.

Data and logs can only be backed up when the SAP HANA database is

Online

Backup and recovery always applies to the whole database. It is not possible

to backup and recover individual database objects.

At the beginning of a recovery, all the data and log backups to be recovered

must be available.

The SAP HANA database software version used during the recovery must

always be the same or higher than the version of the software used to create

the backup.

When the data area is backed up, all the payload data from all the servers is backed

1. This happens in both single-host and multihost environments.

LOG Backup

Log backups are done at regular intervals to allow the reuse of log segments.

Log segment is backed up during these situations:

• The log segment is full

• The log segment is closed after exceeding the configured time threshold

• The database is started

Enabling and Disabling of Automatic log backup can be done by changing the value of the parameter enable_auto_log_backup.

Default: enable_auto_log_backup = yes

Maintain Parameter - log_mode

log_mode = overwrite

Log segments are freed by savepoints and no log backup is performed. For

example, this can be useful for test installations that do not need to be backed

up or recovered.

log_mode = legacy In legacy mode, no log backup is performed. Log segments

are retained until a full data backup is performed. This is to allow recovery from

the most recent full backup and the log in the log area. This was the default setting

for SAP HANA SPS 02.

FAQS are attached...

In HANA development, if you happen to have a need to perform same modifications to the model multiple times in the same model or copy them over to different models, then XML editing would help you save a lot of effort.

In cases like, if your data is based on “Account model”, but the reporting requirement is “Key Figure model”, then you may end up creating a lot of Restricted Key figures and Calculated Key figures. Or consider a case, when the data model contains more than 70 – 80 key figures and you need to apply currency conversion to these Key figures, then the XML editing can help you reduce a lot of manual effort.

If your XML coding skills are advanced, then it can certainly help model large UNION operations, which in current eclipse editor can certainly be painful and may result in hanging the HANA studio.

And in case, if you don’t have any such requirement mentioned above, it would still help you look into the generated XML for the HANA information models to understand how different settings like Default schema, Default Client, Default Language, various input parameters, variables, data sources etc are mapped.

Steps to generate the XML model of the schema:

The XML file can be generated from the right hand side option as shown below, but I prefer the EXPORT functionality so that the same file can be imported back after editing.

The EXPORT / IMPORT option can be found in HANA Studio as shown below. A detailed document on how to use the EXPORT / IMPORT functionality can be found at http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-26381

For the demonstration purpose, let us consider a data model with

• one base Key figure with currency conversion applied (C_SALES)
• 3 base Key Figures which are currently modeled as "simple", but need to be modeled as "Amount with Currency" and also need to apply currency conversion (C_SALES_1, C_SALES_2, C_SALES_3)
• 1 Restricted Key Figure (SALES_2012) with C_SALES restricted to Year 2012
• 1 Calculated Key Figure (SALES_10PER_CC) with 10% of the Sales to be added to the Sales for further calculation.

The model can look like :

Case 1: Modify Key Figures from Simple to Amount with Currency and apply Currency conversion:

The Key Figure (C_SALES) has been defined as Amount with Currency with Dynamic Currency conversion as shown below. Such setting can be copied to the other Key Figures in the generated XML file. This can save considerable effort as compared to performing the modifications in HANA Studio, when the number of Key figures to be modified are significantly high.

Please note that the Schema for currency conversion has been hidden in the screenshot above.

The setting in the XML file can be seen in the following screenshot.

The changes to be done for the Key Figures C_SALES_1, C_SALES_2, C_SALES_3 are as follows:

• Change the measureType from "simple" to "amount" like for C_SALES
• Copy the code block highlighted in the screenshot between <descriptions> and <measureMapping> tab like for C_SALES
  

After the re-import of the XML file, the changes can be seen in the Key Figures C_SALES_1, C_SALES_2, C_SALES_3 as follows:

Please note that the Schema for currency conversion has been hidden in the screenshot above. The same technique can be used to create additional Key Figures in the model as mentioned below.

Case 2: Create additional Restricted and Calculated Key Figures:

Additional Key figures can also be created by copying the existing code blocks for Restricted and Calculated Key figures and modifying the technical name, description and filter / expression conditions. For simplicity, we can copy the existing RKF and CKF and modify the filter conditions and calculations.

To add a Restricted Key figure with Sales for 2013, the XML file can be modified as shown below. The <measure> block can be copied and modified as shown in the screenshot below:

The measure id, description and the restriction values (including the attributes) can be modified after copying. The same concept can be applied for the Calculated Key Figures as shown in the below screenshot. The <measure> block can be copied and modified for the new Calculated Key Figure.

After the modification to the XML file, it can be re-imported and the view can be VALIDATED and ACTIVATED in HANA Studio. The validation process can identify any error in the imported model and can be corrected. The generated model can look like:

Please note that the above mentioned process is an alternative approach to the development based on personal experience. It could be debatable, if this process is supported by SAP. But since the IMPORT of the XML file feature is provided in HANA Studio and the Re-imported model can be validated and activated in HANA studio, I believe the process does not have any negative impact.

Apart from the above mentioned use cases, there could be multiple other use cases, where the XML file modification can help you in the development.

So I leave it to your better judgement on the alternative approach, which can help you reduce your development effort.

Security / Authorizations

Will all existing users get migrated to HANA DB with the correct authorizations?

Absolutely – The ERP database to HANA migration is a full database migration

Will the user administration in ERP on HANA change, how does this impact our security team? Does the Basis Team need to be involved in this HANA research work?

All ERP users / roles are defined through the ERP Application layer. The only change is for the users of the HANA data modeling studio in the HANA datamart, and that also applies to SHAF.

Yes, it is recommended to train the Basis team in SAP HANA, there are specific technical training classes available.

https://training.sap.com/us/en

Where can I find more details on the HANA security capabilities?

SAP HANA Security Guide

This guide describes how to enable security for SAP HANA appliance software and the SAP HANA database.

http://help.sap.com/hana/hana_sec_en.pdf

Is the authorization in the SHAF (SAP HANA Analytical Framework) rather comparable to the ERP on HANA security model, or to the HANA data mart security model?

The user privileges in the SAP HANA data mart security model are currently less granular than the authorizations in BW on HANA and in ERP on HANA.
If more complex security is required, the recommendation is to consume the HANA data models via BW Transient or Virtual InfoProviders.

In order to access SHAF in the sidecar scenario, the Business Suite users share the same technical database user for connecting to the HANA sidecar. This authorization check within Business Suite using PFCG & authorization check.
Once SHAF in the sidecar has been accessed,  HANA based Analytics (Access from reporting tools to HANA ) is utilized. Each HANA based Analytics user becomes a database user and the authorization check within HANA using privileges

Please see the link to the HANA security guide for more details:

http://help.sap.com/hana/hana_sec_en.pdf

SAP HANA database authorization mechanisms use the following privileges:

●System privileges
Perform system-level operations or administrative tasks

●Object privileges
Perform specified actions on specified database objects

●Analytic privileges
Allow selective access control for database views generated when modeled are activated

●Package Privileges
Allow operations on packages, for example, creation and maintenance. Privileges can differ for native and imported packages.

Database Replication Security Guides

These guides describe how to enable security for the data replication technologies related to the SAP HANA appliance software.

SAP HANA Security Guide - Trigger-Based Replication (SLT)

http://help.sap.com/hana/hana_slt_repli_sec_en.pdf

SAP BusinessObjects Data Services Administrator's Guide. Please see the chapters "Security" and "User and Rights Management:

http://help.sap.com/businessobject/product_guides/boexir4/en/xi4_ds_admin_en.pdf

Welcome to SAP Financial Services Network (SAP FSN)!

Join us and learn all about SAP FSN, SAP‘s cloud-based bank – company-integration solution.

1. Overview and business benefits

SAP Financial Services Network (SAP FSN) is a new innovative on-demand solution that connects financial institutions and other financial service providers with their corporate customers on a secure network owned and managed by SAP. The network offers multi-bank and multi-corporate routing as well as multi-format documents. As key benefits, the solution simplifies connectivity, automates financial transactions, reduces payment rejection rates, eases reconciliation and provides enhanced visibility to corporate treasury.

SAP FSN is SAP’s strategic initiative for financial institutions to corporate connectivity. In recent years, financial institutions and other financial service providers have looked to extend their business relationship with their corporate customers by offering value-added services. Additionally, corporate customers have looked to reduce their business risks through relationships with multiple financial institutions, increasing the need to manage their cash positions across those banks. To achieve this, banks and corporate customers need SAP FSN that will be low-cost and flexible, and can on-board and establish connectivity between corporate customer’s and bank’s ERP applications more rapidly. SAP FSN is a new innovative solution approach from SAP to address this need, namely to reduce operational risk and cost while supporting new business initiatives, and enablement of corporates & banks to transact, manage, and monitor a variety of corporate-to-bank services. SAP FSN offers seamless integration with SAP ERP and Treasury systems for better visibility to cash, improved liquidity management, at significantly lower operational costs. SAP FSN is an on-demand solution and consists of Integration as a Service, on-boarding framework, provisioning, management & monitoring capabilities that will be hosted at SAP cloud.

SAP FSN is available to financial institutions and their corporate customers since March 2013. The development of SAP FSN is based on a customer co-innovation initiative including the validation of the solutions by major banks.This means that SAP has taken a collaborative approach with the world’s leading banks in order to develop SAP FSN. Through this co-innovation initiative it is ensured that customers can significantly contribute to the solution in terms of capabilities, such as security, operations, technology, as well as business value.

SAP FSN provides the following benefits:

• Faster onboarding of financial institutions and corporates
• No additional cost for maintaining hardware and software
• Standardize integration between financial institutions and their customers
• Reduced operational risk
• Better visibility and control
• Lower TCO
• Pay-as-you-go subscription model

2. Solution Details

SAP FSN runs on SAP HANA Cloud, is multi-tenant enabled and offers a high performance processing of messages. Key capabilities provided by SAP FSN are routing, mapping, diverse connectivity options, security on multiple levels, onboarding and service activation. SAP FSN supports the reliable and secure exchange of e. g. ISO20022 payment documents, such as payments (“pain.001”), payment status reports (“pain.002”), and statement messages (“CAMT.52/53”), between financial institutions and their corporate customers.

2.1. Routing & Mapping

The payment documents are routed via SAP FSN to the correct receiver bank or corporate; hereby SAP FSN determines the receiver of a message based on the content of the message header or payload. SAP FSN also supports the transformation (“mapping”) of data structures at sender and receiver side into each other. In scenarios spanning between different organizations and enterprises it is most likely that the structure of the data exchanged between the financial institutions and corporate customers differs on both sides. In order to enable a seamless exchange of data, the data structures on both sides of the connected bank and corporate have to be transformed or mapped into each other. SAP FSN allows the mapping of the exchanged documents.

2.2. Communication Protocols and Reliable Messaging

One or more corporate customers can exchange data with one or more financial service providers through SAP FSN. For the data exchange SAP FSN supports the following connectivity options for the communication between a corporation or a financial service provider on one side and SAP FSN on the other side:

• SSH (secure shell) File Transfer Protocol (SFTP), client
• SFTP server, i.e. SAP FSN provides its own SFTP server
• Web Services Reliable Messaging (WS-RM) over HTTPS

SAP FSN supports the quality of service "At Least Once”. According to this service, once SAP FSN receives a message from a sender participant, it stores the message and sends a technical acknowledgment to the sender. It then tries to deliver the message to the receiver participant. In case the receiver is not available, SAP FSN retries sending the message after a defined time interval until the message is sent to the receiver.

Security is a key capability for Cloud based applications and the integration of the same. Therefore SAP FSN supports security on multiple layers.

• Communication

During the operation of an SAP FSN scenario, the connected participants exchange data with each other based on the configured transport protocol. These protocols support different options to protect the exchanged data against unauthorized access, e. g. through certificate based authentication. In addition to security at transport level, the content of the exchanged messages can also be protected by means of digital encryption and signature, e. g. through message level security based on PKCS#7/CMS enveloped data and signed data. The encryption of data allows you to encode the content of a message in such a way that only authorized parties can read it. A digital signature ensures the authenticity of a message that way that it guarantees the identity of the signer and that the message was not altered after signing.

• Data storage security

At several phases of the lifecycle of an SAP FSN scenario, data is stored and therefore exposed to the risk of unauthorized access. There are several measures to protect stored data in SAP FSN. In case of an error situation, dedicated experts at SAP have limited access rights to evaluate the situation. However, access to customer's business data is prevented hereby.

• Security aspects of the onboarding process

During the connection set up between a participant and SAP FSN, data has to be exchanged between experts on SAP and customer's side. There are several measures applied to secure this data exchange. Through this onboarding process also confidential data has to be exchanged between SAP and the participant, like, for example, server addresses or public key certificates as well as names of the involved persons. To increase the security level of the SAP-participant information exchange, access to the relevant data is restricted to a small circle of experts involved in the onboarding process. In order to prevent unauthorized users to access such data, the person who starts the onboarding activity makes sure that only those persons are invited to the SAP StreamWork activity that need to be involved.

• High availability

Several measures are taken to ensure robust operation and high level of operational performance of the SAP FSN runtime. In order to ensure reliable operation of a cluster even in case individual virtual machine crash, failover mechanisms are implemented: In case a virtual machine crashes that is processing a message, this incident is detected by the cluster and a new virtual machine automatically started to take over the task of the crashed virtual machine. Software update of the runtime environment is accomplished with a minimum downtime of about 1 minute.

• Tenant Isolation

For each participant connected to SAP FSN separate resources (in terms of: memory, CPU, file system) of the cloud-based integration platform are allocated – although all participants might share the same hardware. This concept is also referred to as tenant isolation. A tenant represents the resources of the cloud-based integration platform of SAP FSN allocated for a participant. At runtime, SAP FSN processes the data that is exchanged between the involved participants on a cluster of different virtual machines hosted in the SAP cloud, at which each virtual machine is assigned to the corresponding tenant allocated for the connected participant. SAP FSN is designed that way that it is always makes sure that the involved virtual machines are strictly separated from each other with regard to the related participants. In addition to that, each tenant uses a separate database schema which guarantees that data of different participants is strictly separated.

In order to start operating scenarios based on SAP FSN, two kinds of processes are relevant:

• Onboarding:

Is the process of connecting a participant (either a financial service provider or a corporation) to SAP FSN. Onboarding covers all tasks that are necessary in order to configure the data exchange and the connection between the corporate or financial service provider’s system and SAP FSN. The onboarding is a one-time activity and is a prerequisite for service activation.

• Service activation:

Is the process when a financial service provider starts collaboration with a corporate customer. On request, SAP activates the connection between the two participants and informs them once the connection is complete. This allows the newly connected participants to carry out message flow testing across the service prior to moving into the production landscape.

Further information about SAP FSN can be found in the standard documentation on the SAP Help Portal and in the RKT material on SAP Service Marketplace:

• SAP FSN documentation on SAP Help Portal: http://help.sap.com/sapfsn
• SAP FSN Connector documentation on SAP Help Portal: http://help.sap.com/fsnagent
• Knowledge Transfer on SAP Service Marketplace (S-user required): https://websmp103.sap-ag.de/~form/sapnet?_SHORTKEY=01100035870000759375&

Related resources:

• Read more about SAP Financial Services Network on SAP.com
• SAP Financial Services Network – an Introduction

This presentation offers an overview of the solution and its business benefits - simplified connectivity, automated financial transactions, reduced payment rejection rates, easy reconciliation and enhanced visibility to corporate treasury.

• Webinar recording: SAP Financial Services Network (SAP FSN): Innovation for Bank-to-Corporate Connectivity (S-user required)

Interactive webinar tailored for executives. Today, bank to corporate transactions are either manual or require expensive custom development. For corporates, this is expensive and results in a lack of up-to-the-minute visibility of their cash position and liquidity. For banks, on-boarding corporates is a long and costly process that constrains their ability to scale, limiting the number of customers they can serve and thus their revenue potential. Developed to address these challenges, the SAP hosted Financial Services Network, is transforming how banking services can be delivered.

• SAP HANA Cloud Integration
• SAP NetWeaver Process Integration & SOA Middleware
• SAP NetWeaver Process Orchestration

News:

Attending SAPPHIRE NOW? Get connected with the SAP Financial Services Network

SAP HANA Turns 2

Our groundbreaking in-memory platform is growing up. See how SAP HANA continues to transform and inspire business. June 21, 2013

Setting the Record Straight - SAP HANA vs. IBM DB2 BLU

Recently IBM announced BLU accelerator for DB2, which does query acceleration of manually selected tables in DB2 in batch mode using in-memory and columnar techniques. However, there were some unsubstantiated claims and over-reaching statements amid the excitement about BLU. SAP’s Ken Tsai provides his assessment in this blog. June 18, 2013

SAP HANA Commands, Command Line Tools, SQL Reference Examples for NetWeaver Basis Administrators

Andy Silvey set out on a massive undertaking to create a one-stop shop reference for HANA commands and command line tools, plus administrator's SQL queries. Lucky for us, he decided to share it here. June 18, 2013

SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud - Important step to... where?

SAP Mentor (and SAP HANA Distinguished Engineer)  Tomas Krojzlspeculates on what the May 7 announcement of HANA Enterprise Cloud might mean for SAP in the future. His blog inspires more than a few opinionated comments. June 17, 2013

How Does It Work Together: BW, BW on SAP HANA, Suite on SAP HANA, SAP HANA Live

Part 3 of this solid blog series continues the discussion of how diverse customer landscapes can be efficient and synergistic. Posted by Ingo Hilgefort, Part 1 introduced the different landscapes and discussed a customer site without SAP as the backend. In Part 2, Ingo discussed an SAP ERP customer and how such a customer could leverage SAP BusinessObjects BI with and without SAP HANA Live. June 6, 2013

See more recently featured content.

PhD students

There is a number of PhD-students having their offices directly at the SAP HANA database department in Walldorf. They are doing research in the field of database technologies for at least 3 years.

Master and Bachelor students

Other students are writing the Bachelor/Master-Theses (3 - 6 months) at the moment.

Alumnis

Over the years, a large number of students finished their PhD, master, and bachelor theses, respectively.

*Diplom and Magister were German equivalents to M.Sc. or M.A. before the Bologna Process in 2010.

**A Studienarbeit is a project work of roughly 3 months as part of a academic degree.

Open thesis topics

There are always a lot of open topics similar to the ones above. If you are interested in doing a thesis with us, please contact us at students-hana@sap.com.

This is a list of selected publications made by the SAP HANA database team.

2013

• Rudolf, M., Paradies, M., Bornhövd, C., & Lehner, W. (2013). The Graph Story of the SAP HANA Database. BTW (pp. 403–420).
• Robert Brunel, Jan Finis: Eine effiziente Indexstruktur für dynamische hierarchische Daten. BTW Workshops 2013: 267-276
• Martin Kaufmann, Amin Amiri Manjili, Stefan Hildenbrand, Donald Kossmann, Andreas Tonder (SAP). Time Travel in Column Stores. ICDE 2013, Brisbane, Australia, April 8-12, 2013
• Jonathan Dees, Peter Sanders. Efficient Many-Core Query Execution in Main Memory Column-Stores. ICDE 2013, Brisbane, Australia, April 8-12, 2013

• Martin Kaufmann, Peter M. Fischer (Univ. of Freiburg), Donald Kossmann, Norman May (SAP). DEMO: A Generic Database Benchmarking Service. ICDE 2013, Brisbane, Australia, April 8-12, 2013.

• Martin Kaufmann, Amin A. Manjili, Peter M. Fischer (Univ. of Freiburg), Donald Kossmann, Franz Färber (SAP), Norman May (SAP): Timeline Index: A Unified Data Structure for Processing Queries on Temporal Data, SIGMOD 2013,  New York, USA, June 22-27, 2013.
• Jan Finis, Robert Brunel, Alfons Kemper, Thomas Neumann, Franz Faerber, Norman May. DeltaNI: An Efficient Labeling Scheme for Versioned Hierarchical Data. SIGMOD 2013, New York, USA, June 22-27, 2013.
• Michael Rudolf, Marcus Paradies, Christof Bornhövd, Wolfgang Lehner. SynopSys: Large Graph Analytics in the SAP HANA Database Through Summarization. GRADES 2013, New York, USA, June 22-27, 2013.
• Martin Kaufmann. PhD Workshop: Storing and Processing Temporal Data in a Main Memory Column Store. VLDB 2013, Riva del Garda, Italy, August 26-30, 2013.
• Hannes Rauhe, Jonathan Dees, Kai-Uwe Sattler, Franz Färber. Multi-Level Parallel Query Excecution Framework for CPU and GPU. ADBIS 2013, Genoa, Italy, September 1-4, 2013.
• Sebastian Breß, Felix Beier, Hannes Rauhe, Kai-Uwe Sattler, Eike Schallehn, Gunter Saake, Efficient co-processor utilization in database query processing, Information Systems, Volume 38, Issue 8, November 2013, Pages 1084-1096
• Martin Kaufmann, Panagiotis Vagenas, Peter M. Fischer (Univ. of Freiburg), Donald Kossmann, Franz Färber (SAP). DEMO: Comprehensive and Interactive Temporal Query Processing with SAP HANA. VLDB 2013, Riva del Garda, Italy, August 26-30, 2013.

2012

• Rösch, P., Dannecker, L., Hackenbroich, G., & Färber, F. (2012). A Storage Advisor for Hybrid-Store Databases. PVLDB (Vol. 5, pp. 1748–1758).
• Sikka, V., Färber, F., Lehner, W., Cha, S. K., Peh, T., & Bornhövd,  C. (2012). Efficient transaction processing in SAP HANA database.  SIGMOD  Conference (p. 731).
• Färber, F., May, N., Lehner, W., Große, P., Müller, I., Rauhe, H., & Dees, J. (2012). The SAP HANA Database -- An Architecture Overview. IEEE Data Eng. Bull., 35(1), 28-33.
• Sebastian Breß, Felix Beier, Hannes Rauhe, Eike Schallehn, Kai-Uwe Sattler, and Gunter Saake. 2012. Automatic selection of processing units for coprocessing in databases. ADBIS'12

2011

• Färber, F., Cha, S. K., Primsch, J., Bornhövd, C., Sigg, S., & Lehner, W. (2011). SAP HANA Database - Data Management for Modern Business Applications. SIGMOD Record, 40(4), 45-51.
• Jaecksch, B., Faerber, F., Rosenthal, F., & Lehner, W. (2011). Hybrid data-flow graphs for procedural domain-specific query languages, 577-578.
• Große, P., Lehner, W., Weichert, T., & Franz, F. (2011). Bridging Two Worlds with RICE Integrating R into the SAP In-Memory Computing Engine, 4(12), 1307-1317.

2010

• Lemke, C., Sattler, K.-U., Faerber, F., & Zeier, A. (2010). Speeding up queries in column stores: a case for compression, 117-129.
• Bernhard Jaecksch, Franz Faerber, and Wolfgang Lehner. (2010). Cherry picking in database languages.
• Bernhard Jaecksch, Wolfgang Lehner, and Franz Faerber. (2010). A plan for OLAP.
• Paradies, M., Lemke, C., Plattner, H., Lehner, W., Sattler, K., Zeier, A., Krüger, J. (2010): How to Juggle Columns: An Entropy-Based Approach for Table Compression, IDEAS.

2009

• Binnig, C., Hildenbrand, S., & Färber, F. (2009). Dictionary-based order-preserving string compression for main memory column stores. SIGMOD Conference (p. 283).
• Kunkel, Julian M., Tsujita, Y., Mordvinova, O., & Ludwig, T. (2009). Tracing Internal Communication in MPI and MPI-I/O. 2009 International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing, Applications and Technologies (pp. 280-286).
• Legler, T. (2009). Datenzentrierte Bestimmung von Assoziationsregeln in parallelen Datenbankarchitekturen.
• Mordvinova, O., Kunkel, J. M., Baun, C., Ludwig, T., & Kunze, M. (2009). USB flash drives as an energy efficient storage alternative. 2009 10th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Grid Computing (pp. 175-182).
• Transier, F. (2009). Algorithms and Data Structures for In-Memory Text Search Engines.
• Transier, F., & Sanders, P. (2009). Out of the Box Phrase Indexing. In A. Amir, A. Turpin, & A. Moffat (Eds.), SPIRE (Vol. 5280, pp. 200-211).
• Willhalm, T., Popovici, N., Boshmaf, Y., Plattner, H., Zeier, A., & Schaffner, J. (2009). SIMD-scan: ultra fast in-memory table scan using on-chip vector processing units. PVLDB, 2(1), 385-394.
• Jäksch, B., Lembke, R., Stortz, B., Haas, S., Gerstmair, A., & Färber, F. (2009). Guided Navigation basierend auf SAP Netweaver BIA. Datenbanksysteme für Business, Technologie und Web, 596-599.
• Lemke, C., Sattler, K.-uwe, & Franz, F. (2009).  Kompressionstechniken für spaltenorientierte BI-Accelerator-Lösungen.  Datenbanksysteme in Business, Technologie und Web, 486-497.
• Mordvinova,  O., Shepil, O., Ludwig, T., & Ross, A. (2009). A Strategy For Cost  Efficient Distributed Data Storage For In-Memory OLAP. Proceedings IADIS  International Conference Applied Computing, pages 109-117.

2008

• Hill, G., & Ross, A. (2008). Reducing outer joins. The VLDB Journal, 18(3), 599-610.
• Weyerhaeuser, C., Mindnich, T., Faerber, F., & Lehner, W. (2008). Exploiting Graphic Card Processor Technology to Accelerate Data Mining Queries in SAP NetWeaver BIA. 2008 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining Workshops (pp. 506-515).
• Schmidt-Volkmar, P. (2008). Betriebswirtschaftliche Analyse auf operationalen Daten (German Edition) (p. 244). Gabler Verlag.

• Transier, F., & Sanders, P. (2008). Compressed Inverted  Indexes for In-Memory Search Engines. ALENEX (pp. 3-12).

2007

• Sanders, P., & Transier, F. (2007). Intersection in Integer Inverted Indices.
• Legler, T. (2007). Der Einfluss der Datenverteilung auf die Performanz  eines Data Warehouse. Datenbanksysteme für Business, Technologie und  Web.

2006

• Bitton, D., Faerber, F., Haas, L., & Shanmugasundaram, J. (2006). One platform for mining structured and unstructured data: dream or reality?, 1261-1262.
• Geiß, J., Mordvinova, O., & Rams, M. (2006). Natürlichsprachige Suchanfragen über strukturierte Daten.
• Legler, T., Lehner, W., & Ross, A. (2006). Data mining with the SAP NetWeaver BI accelerator, 1059-1068.

These are the new/modified OSS notes relating to HANA in the last 30 days. You will need an OSS logon to view the detail of the notes (note numbers are links to the note in OSS), but this will at least give an overview of the activity and updates relating to HANA.

TO CREATE SCHEMA Using SQL Editor

SYNTAX :  CREATE  SCHEMA <schema_name>

Ex: CREATE  SCHEMA  EXSCH

To Create Column Table Using SQL Editor

syntax :  create column table <schema_name>. <table_name> (Field_name1 Datatype ,Field_name2 Datatype,Field_name3  Datatype  ,.................)

EX : createcolumntable"EXSCH"."EMP"( "EID"INTEGERnotnull,"ENAME"VARCHAR (100)null, "ESAL"DECIMALnotnull,

       "ELOC"VARCHAR (100) null,primarykey ("EID"))

Store Procedure to insert value

Example

CREATEPROCEDURE EXSCH.EMP_INSERT_PROCS (IN EID INTEGER ,

       IN ENAME VARCHAR(100) ,

       IN ESAL DECIMAL ,

       IN ELOC VARCHAR(100) ) LANGUAGE SQLSCRIPT AS

BEGININSERT

INTO"EXSCH"."EMP"VALUES (EID,

ENAME,

ESAL,

ELOC)

;

END

;

Store procedure to Update Values in table

Example:

CREATEPROCEDURE EXSCH.EMP_UPDATE_PROC (IN EID INTEGER ,

       IN ENAME VARCHAR(100) ,

       IN ESAL DECIMAL ,

       IN ELOC VARCHAR(100) ) LANGUAGE SQLSCRIPT AS

BEGINUPDATE"EXSCH"."EMP"

SET   ENAME = :ENAME ,

ESAL =:ESAL ,

ELOC  =:ELOC

WHERE EID   =:EID

;

END

;

Store procedure to Delete Values in table

CREATEPROCEDURE EXSCH.EMP_DELETE_PROC (IN EID INTEGER ,

       IN ENAME VARCHAR(100) ,

       IN ESAL DECIMAL ,

       IN ELOC VARCHAR(100) ) LANGUAGE SQLSCRIPT AS

BEGINDELETE

FROM"EXSCH"."EMP"

WHERE EID =:EID

;

END

;

Regards

T SrinivasuluReddy

To consume HANA views in Business objects dashboard you have to create a universe in sematic layer using IDT and publish the same. Using the universe we create a report in Dashboard.

Creating dashboard on HANA views involves three basic steps

Prerequisite:

HANA views- attribute view/analytical view/calculation view is already created in SAP HANA.

Execution:

1. Creation of a universe.
2. Creation of a dashboard.
3. Publishing and viewing dashboard

Detailed Steps:

1. Creation of a universe

• Launch IDT and create a project.
• Create a Relational Connection (of type SAP->JDBC Drivers) to HANA system.

• Once created the connections, publish the connection to the repository.

• Create a Data Foundation with a Single Source option.

• In the next screen select the relational connection for the HANA system where view is lying.
• Once the data foundation screen opens, select Calculation View from the right side panel. All activated views (Attribute/Analytical/Calculation views) will be shown under _SYS_BIC schema. The naming convention will be like packagename.subschema/viewname.
• Create Relational Business Layer on top of this Data Foundation.
• Select the required Fields(Attributes and Measures) and hide the unwanted fields.
• Make sure the Aggregation has been set for Measures. Even though aggregation is specified, the aggregation function has to be explicitly specified in SQL Function if the measures in order to achieve desired aggregation.
• Go to Queries and check for the HANA data by clicking the Refresh. The data should be shown based on the selected fields.
• Publish the Business Layer into BIP Repository as a Universe in order to consume by other BO Reporting Tools.

2. Creation of a dashboard

• Launch the Dashboard Design from Start Menu
• Click a Blank Model

• Click “Add Query” in the Query Browser

• Mention the BIP Server details to open the session which includes hostname; user; password 

• Now Select the Universe in the “Add Query” dialog->Click Next

• Select the required Characteristics and Measures in put it under “Result Objects”. Mention the filters, under “Filters” panel, if required and click Refresh. HANA data will be shown under Result Set as shown below

• Click Next->Next->Ok

• Now bind the field(say Division) values to Excel cells:

• Place the component(say ListView) into Canvas and map the Excel cell values to ListView

3. Publishing and viewing dashboard.

• Save the Dashboard into BOE Server

• Now login to CMC->Folders. The published dashboard will be shown here in the folder.
• Right click to View the dashboard

Hope this helps to the freshbees on SAP HANA and Business Objects Dashboards.

Feel free to ask questions.

HAPPY HANA

Deepak Chodha.

The 3 replication method of sap hana

1.Trigger base replication method

2.ETL based replication

3.Log based replication

Using SAP Landscape Transformation (LT) Replication Server is based on capturing database changes at a high level of abstraction in the source ERP systemTrigThis method of replication benefits from being database-independent, and can also parallelize database changes on multiple tables or by segmenting large table changes

ETL-based replication: Employs an Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) process to extract data from the data source; transform it to meet the business or technical needs, and then load it into the SAP HANA database.

ger-based Replicati

ETL based data replication uses SAP Business Objects Data Services(referred to as Data Services from now on) to load the relevant business data from the source system , SAP ERP, and replicate it to the target, SAP HANA database .
This method enables you to read the required business data on the level of the application layer.

Log-Based Replication
Transaction Log-Based Data Replication Using Sybase Replication is based on capturing table
changes from low-level database log files. This method is database-dependent

Data Flow for Initial Load and Update

Both the initial load of business data from the source system into SAP HANA database as well as
updating the replicated data (delta handling) is done using SAP BusinessObjects Data Services.

The initial load can be set up modeling a simple data flow from source to target.

For the update, in most cases, the data flow is enhanced by a delta handling element, such as Map_CDC_Operation or Table_Comparison Transform

From the SAP HANA Community, we are please to announce "Hands on SAP HANA" webcast series starting in September. In these webcasts, the audience drives the agenda! We will have technical experts on various HANA-related topics from SAP and our partners who will answer your questions about planning, implementing, and using SAP HANA in your organization/company. The webcast agenda and presentation will be based on largely on the questions and interests of the audience. The speakers will answer questions in an interactive format during the live webcasts and through this community after the webcasts for questions that are generated after the webcast.

So, get started and ask as many questions (under the headline) as you want about these topics. More topics and other details will added in the coming days.

Deploying SAP HANA in your Data center (September 10, 2013)

High Availability and Disaster Recovery with SAP HANA (September 17, 2013)

There had been always a requirement to create a HANA Information model object to display the Factory Calendar. I just happened to receive some Information on Factory calendar related tables and could create a HANA script for displaying the Factory Calendar. This can be customized and used in a script based Calc view and can be then joined with the Transactional data.

Please note that the script is currently created to suit my own business requirements and can be enhanced to add more information as per your business needs.

Tables required for Factory Calendar HANA Information model:

• SAP Tables:
  • TFACD - Factory calendar definition
  • TFACT - Factory calendar texts
  • TFAIN - Calendar: Intervals for company holidays, special shifts
  • THOC - Public Holiday Calendar
  • THOL - Public Holidays
  • THOLT - Public holiday text

• HANA generated Table:
  • "_SYS_BI".M_TIME_DIMENSION

• User defined Table:
  • TC_DAY_CALENDAR

I am sure there is proper documentation on Factory Calendar related tables on SAP Help portal which can be helpful in understanding the table structures.

The HANA generated Table M_TIME_DIMENSION contains data as generated using “Generate Time Data” option in HANA. Please find a nice document on this forum explaining how to generate the data. (http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-25977).

The granularity of the data in the generated table is quite high at "Second" level leading to millions of records in the table and may not be required for the Factory calendar. Hence a user defined table (TC_DAY_CALENDAR) can be created as a subset of the data from M_TIME_DIMENSION.

*** This can also be a view on M_TIME_DIMENSION, but I chose to create a table for some other purpose.

The code for the User defined table and the factory Calendar script is as follows:

CREATE COLUMN TABLE TC_DAY_CALENDAR (

DATE_SQL          DATE,

DATE_SAP          VARCHAR(8),

YEAR              VARCHAR(4),

QUARTER           VARCHAR(2),

MONTH             VARCHAR(2),

WEEK              VARCHAR(2),

WEEK_YEAR         VARCHAR(4),

DAY_OF_WEEK       VARCHAR(2),

DAY               VARCHAR(2),

CALQUARTER        VARCHAR(5),

CALMONTH          VARCHAR(6),

CALWEEK           VARCHAR(6),

YEAR_INT          INTEGER,

QUARTER_INT       TINYINT,

MONTH_INT         TINYINT,

WEEK_INT          TINYINT,

WEEK_YEAR_INT     INTEGER,

DAY_OF_WEEK_INT   TINYINT,

DAY_INT           TINYINT,

MONTH_LAST_DAY    TINYINT

);

insert into TC_DAY_CALENDAR

  ( DATE_SQL, DATE_SAP, YEAR, QUARTER, MONTH, WEEK, WEEK_YEAR,

    DAY_OF_WEEK, DAY, CALQUARTER, CALMONTH, CALWEEK,

    YEAR_INT, QUARTER_INT, MONTH_INT, WEEK_INT, WEEK_YEAR_INT,

    DAY_OF_WEEK_INT, DAY_INT, MONTH_LAST_DAY )

select distinct

    DATE_SQL, DATE_SAP, YEAR, QUARTER, MONTH, WEEK, WEEK_YEAR,

    DAY_OF_WEEK, DAY, CALQUARTER, CALMONTH, CALWEEK,

    YEAR_INT, QUARTER_INT, MONTH_INT, WEEK_INT, WEEK_YEAR_INT,

    DAY_OF_WEEK_INT, DAY_INT, MONTH_LAST_DAY

from "_SYS_BI".M_TIME_DIMENSION

where HOUR = '12'; --- Required as for some of the dates there could be another Week number assigned, especially for Hour '00'.

Script for Factory Calendar:

SELECT

  tfacd.ident FACT_CAL_ID,

  tfact.ltext FACT_CAL_NAME,

  cal.DATE_SQL,

  cal.DATE_SAP,

  cal.YEAR,

  cal.QUARTER,

  cal.MONTH,

  cal.WEEK,

  cal.WEEK_YEAR,

  cal.DAY_OF_WEEK,

  cal.DAY,

  cal.CALQUARTER,

  cal.CALMONTH,

  cal.CALWEEK,

  cal.YEAR_INT,

  cal.QUARTER_INT,

  cal.MONTH_INT,

  cal.WEEK_INT,

  cal.WEEK_YEAR_INT,

  cal.DAY_OF_WEEK_INT,

  cal.DAY_INT,

  cal.MONTH_LAST_DAY,

  DAYNAME(cal.DATE_SQL) DAY_NAME,

  MONTHNAME(cal.DATE_SQL) MONTH_NAME,

  CASE

    WHEN tfain.wert = 0 THEN 0

    WHEN tfain.wert = 1 THEN 1

    WHEN phol.IS_HOLIDAY ='X' AND tfacd.fetag = 0 THEN 0

    WHEN cal.DAY_OF_WEEK_INT = 0 AND tfacd.motag = 0 THEN 0

    WHEN cal.DAY_OF_WEEK_INT = 1 AND tfacd.ditag = 0 THEN 0

    WHEN cal.DAY_OF_WEEK_INT = 2 AND tfacd.miwch = 0 THEN 0

    WHEN cal.DAY_OF_WEEK_INT = 3 AND tfacd.dotag = 0 THEN 0

    WHEN cal.DAY_OF_WEEK_INT = 4 AND tfacd.frtag = 0 THEN 0

    WHEN cal.DAY_OF_WEEK_INT = 5 AND tfacd.satag = 0 THEN 0

    WHEN cal.DAY_OF_WEEK_INT = 6 AND tfacd.sotag = 0 THEN 0

    ELSE 1

  END WORKDAY,

  phol.DATE_DESC_LONG HOLIDAY_DESC,

  --IFNULL(phol.DATE_DESC_LONG, DAYNAME(cal.DATE_SQL)) HOLIDAY_DESC,

  CASE

    WHEN cal.DATE_SQL

      = MAX(CASE WHEN tfain.wert = 0 THEN NULL

                 WHEN tfain.wert = 1 THEN NULL

                 WHEN phol.IS_HOLIDAY ='X' AND tfacd.fetag = 0 THEN NULL

                 WHEN cal.DAY_OF_WEEK_INT = 0 AND tfacd.motag = 0 THEN NULL

                 WHEN cal.DAY_OF_WEEK_INT = 1 AND tfacd.ditag = 0 THEN NULL

                 WHEN cal.DAY_OF_WEEK_INT = 2 AND tfacd.miwch = 0 THEN NULL

                 WHEN cal.DAY_OF_WEEK_INT = 3 AND tfacd.dotag = 0 THEN NULL

                 WHEN cal.DAY_OF_WEEK_INT = 4 AND tfacd.frtag = 0 THEN NULL

                 WHEN cal.DAY_OF_WEEK_INT = 5 AND tfacd.satag = 0 THEN NULL

                 WHEN cal.DAY_OF_WEEK_INT = 6 AND tfacd.sotag = 0 THEN NULL

                 ELSE cal.DATE_SQL

            END) over (partition BY cal.CALMONTH)

    THEN 1

    ELSE 0

  END last_workday_in_month

FROM TC_DAY_CALENDAR cal

INNER JOIN SAPUSER.TFACD tfacd ON cal.DATE_SAP BETWEEN (tfacd.vjahr|| '0101') AND (tfacd.bjahr|| '1231')

LEFT OUTER JOIN SAPUSER.TFACT tfact ON tfact.ident  = tfacd.ident AND tfact.spras = 'E'

LEFT OUTER JOIN SAPUSER.TFAIN tfain ON tfain.ident = tfacd.ident

                        AND cal.DATE_SAP BETWEEN (tfain.von) AND (tfain.bis)

LEFT OUTER JOIN V_PUBLIC_HOLIDAY phol ON phol.DATE = cal.DATE_SAP AND phol.IDENT = tfacd.hocid

--WHERE tfacd.ident = 'D1' -- Specify factory Calendar Id

--  AND cal.DATE_SAP BETWEEN '20130701' and '20130801'  -- Date Range

--ORDER BY cal.DATE_SAP

;

A subset of the above data can be seen in the below screenshot:

Hope this helps.

Dear All:

As you may know, SAP HANA studio and client were released.

It is good news for using old 32 bit OS developer, this release version of SAP HANA client tool contained regi dev tools. So developer can develop XS engine project base on 32bit OS.

It did not contain regi tool in passed reversion of HANA client for 32bit OS, it is only support 64bit OS.

Anyway, thank SAP DEV team to implement this in newest reversion, it is great work for using old OS developer to develop XS engine project.

Please refer to below link to download it.

https://hanadeveditionsapicl.hana.ondemand.com/hanadevedition/

GREAT WORK.

Regards,

Jerry