Defining System Usage Type in HANA

Defining System Usage Type in HANA

In order to provide additional safety and indication while working with production HANA systems, SAP HANA provides “usage” parameter (available from SPS8 onwards). This parameter can be set to either :

• production
• test
• development
• custom (default)

When set to “production” administrators get an indication that it’s a production system when they open administration console in HANA Studio. Also when this parameter is set to “production” additional confirmation dialog appears for specific actions line executing SQL.

This document provides the steps necessary to set this parameter.

• Logon to the HANA System from HANA studio with a user that has authorizations to change the database configuration.

• Select the HANA Database and right click and select “Configuration and Monitoring” à “Open Administration”.

• Make sure all the processes are running by selecting “Landscape” tab in “Administration Console“.

• Now click on “Configuration” tab and expand “global.ini” and under global.ini expand “system_information” you will see “usage” parameter.

Any configuration parameter in SAP HANA has three levels:

1. Default: This value is set by default by HANA and we should not change this value
2. System: (wide) For scale-out systems this value applies to the entire cluster. To change a parameter for entire cluster we need to change this value.
3. Host: (specific) For scale-out systems you can set different values for different hosts. Change this parameter to effect a specific host.

To change the “usage” type double click on the “usage” row as shown in the above diagram and set the “New Value” under “System” section to “production” and click Save.

After clicking on save you can see the new parameter value “production” is reflecting under the system column.

Since this parameter is a dynamic parameter you need not restart the system. To see if the changes are reflected log off in HANA Studio close the administration console and login again and open the “Administration Console”. You can see a yellow background and also mentioning it is a “Production System”

Now open the SQL Console by selecting the database from the Systems View at the left and select the SQL Icon as shown in the figure below.

Now execute a simple SQL statement like:

As shown in the figure below a dialog popup comes up alerting the administrator it is a Production system and if he is ok to continue.

Only if the administrator confirms will the SQL statement be executed and he can see the output.