SAP HANA: The comforts of deleting SAP LT Configurations

[former_member182913]

Good day.

A very helpful and nice colleague from the SAP SCN content team asked me some weeks ago why I post HANA stuff on my personal SCN blog rather than posting it under the SAP HANA community areas in SAP SCN:

• My main rational reason is the following: When I started this SCN Blog there were no such established HANA communities in SCN. The second derivative of my rational reason is that I am not sure in which HANA SCN Community should I post: The main HANA community branch? The developer branch? An eternal Buridan's donkey kind of dilemma...
• My non-rational self just decided, at least for the time being, to be a bit quirky and stick to my personal blog. Call me sentimental... I don't think that the hit rate for my blog would increase much by posting my stuff somewhere else. I'm too quirky and too irregular. But of course I can be wrong.

And speaking of quirks, today I want to talk shortly about one on the SAP LT space.

My experiments with SAP LT replication to SAP HANA 1.0 SPS4, using the same ERP data source to replicate data to multiple schemas in the same HANA instance have not been successful up to now, to put it mildly. With SPS5 there have been some SAP LT related improvements, but I haven't had the chance to experiment with SPS5 live yet.

Thing is that when you create an SAP LT configuration using the LTR transaction on SAP ERP, there is a flag which promises you that it will allow you to replicate to multiple schemas, at least in theory, BUT when I checked it, the replication simply did not work, not even for the first replication schema. And if the first does not work, forget about the second...

LTR started to show me nasty warnings on the dictionary table triggers, which simply did not go away. On the HANA studio catalog the SLT replication schema was created, all right, but the Data Provisioning functions showed me an eternally scheduled replication, where you could wait and wait until the end of time for something to happen... no dictionary data was replicated, no nothing...

What do you do in such cases, very intuitively, very instinctively?

Well, you succumb to the temptation and comforts of badly wanting to delete the SLT configuration on the ERP side, and also all related schemas and objects on the HANA side, and to try again, this time WITHOUT setting the whimsical flag for multiple replication schemas...

And the first strategy that occurs to you is to DROP SCHEMA <hana_replication_schema> on the HANA side, right?

Clever!

You can get crazy!

It does not work...

No authorization...

And you wonder... WHY? You are using the SYSTEM user... which is the most powerful user in the HANA Studio kingdom (and which, by the by, you shouldn't EVER use directly... You'd rather create a copy or near-copy of the SYSTEM user with similar rights, and use the clone, bitteschön... Do what I say, and not what I do.)

Going back to our drama...

You are using the SYSTEM user, and there is no way to drop the SAP LT replication schema! What's that? Some hidden Poltergeist or what?

You are desperate, and ask an expert colleague of yours, and tell him you will not be able to sleep that night without the answer...

and he answers what you should have known already, you silly!

The SAP LT replication schema is a USER schema, mind you!

You simply need to DROP USER <hana_replication_schema> CASCADE

and that's that...

Please, don't tell anyone that I did not know that by heart when I was born... OK, OK, I should have read the manual more carefully... sorry, sorry... Mea culpa...

Gemma Durany

Founder and Managing Director

WeeDooCare Business Solutions GmbH