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lucas_kiesow
Explorer

Testing challenges

Testing application workload can be a huge effort for users, developers and consultants alike. Also, things do not get easier on a large scale, especially for moving from one revision or SPS of SAP HANA to another.

The common approach to this is using customized scripts for database access or executing test scenarios in client applications. Of course, developing such scenarios and test cases is a large and therefore very costly development effort – all of it just to ensure the solution still works correctly with the new SAP HANA software.
For regression testing a new SAP HANA SPS across a whole system landscape with multiple application stacks the complexity increases even more since now the interoperation between SAP HANA and the various client applications or reporting tools needs to be tested. The outcome of all this effort are hand-crafted tests that may only resemble the actual workload to a certain degree.

Recording workload instead of “developing” it

For this reason, we are offering the new SAP HANA capture and replay tool with SAP HANA SPS12. Specifically aimed at the aforementioned testing scenarios that many of us run into every day, SAP HANA capture and replay offers a currently semi-automated tool for integrated testing in the context of SAP HANA. The goal is simplifying the manual effort needed for creating tests and performing a more accurate replay than what is possible with other approaches.
SAP HANA capture and replay allows for similar concurrency, memory allocation and CPU usage than the captured workload, something that is difficult to achieve with for example script-based testing scenarios.

Simple steps instead of coding tests

The process is very simple:

  1. Simply generate workload on the database using the existing landscape and record it using the new tool (1).
    For initializing a consistent test system, a full database backup is also needed.
  2. Next, use the tool to pre-process the workload and prepare it for replay on your desired SAP HANA test system (2).
  3. Then, simply trigger the replay (3) and
  4. use the report for analyzing any runtime-based differences between the capture and the replay (4).

In this initial release, SAP HANA Capture and Replay can capture all incoming SQL statements at the session layer of the SAP HANA database. This covers all connections via ODBC, JDBC or SQLDBC (SAP NetWeaver).
However, it is currently not possible to capture XS engine workload coming to the database via HTTP calls. This includes statements coming from native HANA XS Classic applications (not XS Advanced) as well as statements coming directly from SAP Analysis for Office 2.x.

One tool, many uses

The use cases for SAP HANA capture and replay are very diverse. The tool can be used to

  • evaluate potential regressions and improvements across SAP HANA revisions, O/S software updates, firmware changes, etc.
  • evaluate performance impact of changed information model implementations, system landscape setups (e.g. adding/removing SAP HANA nodes), etc.
  • test different table distributions, index changes, partition changes, etc.
  • analyze impact of changes to system parameters or data volume changes.

BETA program for the early birds

Beginning with SAPPHIRE 2016, SAP also offers a invitation-only beta program for our new Hybrid Cloud Service program for SAP HANA capture and replay.
If you or your customers want to register and are interested in participating, please refer to the following links:

Other useful links

Here is a collection of other useful links with information related to SAP HANA capture and replay:

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