Overview

SAP is going out of its way to promote adoption of HANA. Being an SAP consultant for more than 15 years, I can vouch for the fact that SAP has never done this before. They have gone from “SAP training is available only to customers or partners” in early days of SAP R/3 to “Here is $150 credit on Amazon for you to play with HANA and this includes a free license for HANA”. Quite a dramatic progress, I must say. I started with:

• Free 30 day trial to a hosted HANA system
• Took the HANA certification exam and got my HANA certification
• Used the free $150 amazon credit to setup my own HANA system. Special thanks to Juergen for excellent instructions on getting started with HANA on Amazon. It really made it simple and easy to do. It took me only couple of hours from start to finish: setting up the amazon account, key pairs, provisioning the instance, downloading HANA studio, setting up Putty SSH client to communicate with the the instance and so on.

This blog documents my experience with the next steps for creating a new user in the HANA system, so that the user can create new tables, load data from a CSV file, and create an attribute view.

Creating a new User

After I setup my HANA system on Amazon, I created a new user to do development work. The HANA system comes with the default SYSTEM user. It is recommended to do all development work under a development user and not the delivered SYSTEM user.

1. From the System node, open Catalog->Authorization->Users. Right click and select New User
2. 
3. Input username, password. Add CONTENT_ADMIN role in the granted roles. Click on the + sign, start typing in CONTENT and select the role. You can select the option for the user to Grant the role to other users, if needed.
4. 
5. Add SQL Privileges as shown here. For each schema, I selected all the privileges on the right. I am not sure if all the privileges are recommended. Maybe some HANA security expert can comment.
6. 
7. To be able to import a csv file, make sure the following system privilege us granted to the user
8. 
9. Deploy the user using the green arrow on top right of the window
10. Now you can add the new user to HANA studio
11. 

Open a SQL editor window for the new user. Execute “grant select on schema <Newuser> to _SYS_REPO with grant option;” Put in the username in place of <Newuser>

Now you should be able to perform the following as the newly created user:

• create a table in the user’s schema
• load a csv file to load records in the new table
• create a package
• Create and activate an attribute view

Conclusion

SAP has taken the first step to help the developers / consultants learn HANA – the breakthrough next generation in memory database. It is up to the community to make the best of this opportunity and share our learnings, so that collectively we can learn faster. I hope to continue sharing my knowledge as I use the test system.

Thanks to Anooj’s post for helping me figure some of the steps.