SAP HANA Developer Guide – A New Beginning
Around 7 years ago, I blogged quite a bit about the SAP NetWeaver Portal Development Kit, and then moved on to discussing the SAP Business One SDK. But it’s been a while since I was involved in something worth blogging about. But now I work on the documentation for SAP HANA development, and there have been (and will be) changes worth talking about.
Today, the SAP Help Portal is publishing a new set of documentation to help SAP HANA developers. This is an especially important documentation set, since SAP HANA is no longer just a fast, in-memory database but also a platform for building state-of-the-art applications.
The documentation is located on the SAP Help Portal.
The key changes to the documentation is that it consolidates a lot of smaller guides into a single SAP HANA Developer’s Guide, which explains, step by step:
- What is SAP HANA from a developer’s point of view?
- What is the development process, and how do I get started developing in the SAP HANA studio?
- How do I create a project? (This section includes a easy and short tutorial.)
- And how do I build all the development objects I need for my application?
- Schemas
- Tables
- Views (including analytic privileges to control access to the subsets of the data)
- Procedures
- Server-side JavaScript (including database API)
- OData and XMLA definitions
- Web content, including pages built with SAPUI5
It also includes a chapter on how to package and transport your application, as well as how to use client interfaces (like ODBC and JDBC) if you are connecting to SAP HANA from an external application server.
In addition to the guide, there is an upgraded set of guides:
- SAP HANA SQL Reference (updated for SPS05, with better and clearer examples)
- SAP HANA SQLScript Reference
- SAP HANA System Tables and Monitoring Views Reference
- SAP HANA R Integration Guide
- SAP HANA Business Function Library (BFL) Reference (new library of business functions for your procedures)
- SAP HANA Predictive Analysis Library (PAL) Reference (new library of analytic functions for your procedures)
- SAP HANA XS JavaScript Reference (when writing server-side JavaScript to expose your data)
And, there is a really cool new picture on the cover:
Enjoy, and please let me know what you like, what you don’t, and what is missing.
Thanks for informing !!
Hi, The links are not working yet. Is the documentation not yet available ? Best regards, Philipp
'I checked the links and they seem to be OK, and the page is updated. Maybe they didn't upload the documentation till later in the day yesterday.
If there are specific links not working, let me know.
Hi Daniel,
fantastico
thank you
Andy.
Hi,
Great work, thanks.
Can you please clarify if these documentation should be studied for HANA certification? I mean, I have booked the certification before this documentation is released (i.e. SP4) and I am yet to take the test.
Thanks.
RG
Hi RG,
Thanks for the comment. These are all for SP5. A good amount is also for SP4, but a lot of it is specific to SP5, especially repository and SAP HANA XS, which enable alot of real programming functionality and changes significantly how you work with SAP HANA.
Daniel
Thanks for sharing. Good set of documents. One more people ask for is MDX Reference. especially that now HANA SP5 supports XMLA. Regards.
Hi Vitaliy,
What do you think we need? We have a section on the MDX functions that SAP HANA supports, plus the MDX extensions available in SAP HANA (both in the Database Client Interfaces section, toward the end of the guide). Otherwise, Microsoft provides documentation on MDX.
Thanks for the comment.
Daniel
Thank you, Daniel. I haven't noticed MDX chapter in the Dev Guide. I will know now where to direct those asking about MDX. Regards. -Vitaliy
Great. It's a PDF so you can obviously search, but you can look under Using Database Client Interfaces --> Connecting via ODBO --> MDX. There is a section on the supported MDX functions and the SAP HANA extensions to MDX. Hope this section is useful for people.
Thanks Daniel. Do you have anything on the HANA Analytical Workbench?
thanks
JB
Hi JB,
Are you referring to the ANKHOR tool? I'm not familiar with it. The documentation set I wrote about is for the core SAP HANA capabilities.
Daniel
We are currently testing the XMLA interface. The connection is established, the MDX queries and requests Discover some work already.
Unfortunately, SAP Hana incorrect XML requests supplies. All timestamps (datetime) are not formatted correctly. Since the "T" between Date and Time is missing. Here an example from Discover MDSCHEMA_CUBES:
Is: ... <LAST_DATA_UPDATE> 2014-09-05 14:03:49.8910000 </ LAST_DATA_UPDATE> ...
Should be: ... <LAST_DATA_UPDATE> 2014-09-05T14:03:49.8910000 </ LAST_DATA_UPDATE> ...
Probably makes sense to open a new thread on your issue, will be seen easier and people can address what you're asking.