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Author's profile photo Jens Gleichmann
Jens Gleichmann
December 28, 2016 3 minute read

Time to upgrade your HANA system if…

often people ask me: “when is the right time to update/upgrade the HANA system?”. Normally if your system works fine and it meets the business requirements there is no need besides:

  1. Support
  2. Known functional bugs (e.g. wrong result or index server crash)
  3. Significant performance improvements
  4. Bugs which have influence to the consistency of the data
  5. Dependencies to the application / operating system

1) Support

End of support for SPS11 was in November 2016. So all new fixes for HANA 1.0 will get released in SPS12. Now not only till SPS13, because there will no SPS13. SPS12 has support from May 2016 till May  2019  2021, because it is the last release of HANA platform 1.0

 

Details:

HANA Revision strategy

2021789 – SAP HANA 1.0 Revision and Maintenance Strategy

2378962 – SAP HANA 2.0 Revision and Maintenance Strategy

1948334 – SAP HANA Database Update Paths for SAP HANA Maintenance Revisions

2115815 – FAQ: SAP HANA Database Patches and Upgrades

 

 

2) and 4) Known Bugs

Another reason for upgrading to latest release of SPS12 (currently: 122.16 05/2018) are the known bugs which are also connected with some issues regarding the consistency:

 
Product Description Note affected prior affected in SPS12
All Garbage Collection Fails for LOB Files of Row Store Tables 2351467 <= 112.05 <= 122.01
All Possible unique constraint violation when using non-ASCII Characters 2338166 <= 112.03 <= 121
All Insert of UTF-8 non-ASCII Characters Can Cause Wrong Dictionary Ordering 2339989 <= 112.03 <= 121
BW Possible Data Corruption after Activating Data in advanced DataStore Objects 2385658 >= 110 <= 122.03
All Possible Column Store Table Corruption 2375691 >= 110 <= 122.02
All Possible Rowstore Table Corruption When Continuous Page Flush is Enabled 2370160 – <=122.03
All Join Engine Query Returns Unexpected Results in Aggregation of Large Intermediate Result Sets in 122.04 2403088 – =122.04
All Potential data loss during HANA upgrade with unsuccessful Delta merge 2344374 < 112.04 <= 121
All Switching from operation mode logreplay to delta datashipping can cause corrupted data 2434600 <=112.07 <=122.11
All Indexserver Crash at ptime::Futex::lock While Checking a Corrupt Rowstore Table for Consistency 2434657 <=112.07 <=122.06
All Found new log hole, Log ends at 0x###, cannot recover until 0x### (inexact) 2434278 – <=122.05
All Inconsistency After Repartitioning a Table Using Inverted Hash Indexes 2436619 <=112.07 <=122.99
All Indexserver Crash at UnifiedTable::FragmentObject::getMaxRowID While Checking a Corrupt Partitioned Columnstore Table for Consistency 2443040 <=112.07 <=122.08
All Indexserver Crash at TransactionManager::PersistenceSessionContainer at Caller Metadata::GrantedPrivInfo::deleteGrantedPrivInfo due to Orphaned Roles 2477085 – <=122.09
All Potential Inconsistencies on Column Store Tables with Async Fulltext Index After Table Rename Operation 2573918 – <=122.15
All Out of Memory Situations During Table Load can Cause NULL Values in Column Store Tables on Revision 122.15 2614670 – =122.15
All Indexserver Crash at ptime::PageLocker::unlock With “Assertion failed: isLocked” After Upgrading to SAP HANA database Revisions 122.15 or 012.04 2611939 – =122.15
All Column Store Table Cannot be Loaded After Indexserver Restart 2640933 – <=122.10

Recommendation: Please check carefully if your system is affected by the bugs in 2375691 or 2370160! For details how to check them just the follow the instructions in the notes. If you hit one of this bugs, you have to restore your system to correct the affected tables!!!

3) Significant performance improvements

Just check the corresponding “known issues” note for your release for improvements:
2325090 – SAP HANA DB: Known issues detected in SPS12
2265103 – SAP HANA DB: Known issues detected in SPS11
2000002 – FAQ: SAP HANA SQL Optimization

5) Dependencies to the application / operating system

Since S/4HANA 1709 you have to use HANA 2 >= SPS01 and also if you use one of the latest OS releases (2235581) you have to use one of the latest revisions.

For SLES12 SP3 you need >=122.15

For RHEL 7.4 you need >=122.14

 

 

 

So if you are currently running with 122.05 you are pretty save, but as you know from the past – every revision has its own “features” which you can see from the table of known bugs. [Edit] You should update to >=122.16 to avoid inconsistencies in connection with special scenarios and use of features described in the notes above.

But another parameter which comes with 122.02 is unload_upper_bound which “reduces” the memory usage (details in note 2301382 – High “Used memory” in Pool/PersistenceManager/PersistentSpace/DefaultLPA/Page after upgrade to HANA SPS11 or a higher SPS). The heap memory usage with virtual file pages will be covered in the next blog. If you are interested just follow me 😉

Regards,
Jens

############
Update 1.1
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HANA memory usage details and changes in SPS12
HANA memory usage details: Part 1 Shared Memory
HANA memory usage details: Part 2 Heap Memory

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Update 1.2
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2403088 – Join Engine Query Returns Unexpected Results in Aggregation of Large Intermediate Result Sets in 122.04

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Update 1.3
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Added 3)
HANA details part 3 tech. changes in sps12

 

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Update 1.4
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Added new support for HANA 1.0 ,new Known Bugs and dependencies to the application / OS

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      4 Comments
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      Author's profile photo Former Member
      Former Member

      The recent patching path for HANA SP12 has been frustrating to say the least.

      Guided by SAP's "Revision and Maintenance Strategy" slides that advocated us to move to the next DSP Revision - Rev. 122), we wanted to run an upgrade from SPS09.

      We were assured (deceived - actually) that the DSP Revision was the one that we wanted, because it has "already run in SAP Production systems for 2+ weeks", and it is Recommended to "SAP customers with HANA installed in their Production systems" (customers who valued reliability and stability above new features; customers who are not early adapters).

      And the DSP revision available for us was SP12 (122.02) back in Sep 2016. So we went for that revision.

      So we went live with 122.02 back in Oct 2016. And just a couple weeks later in Nov 2016, SAP announced a critical HotNews OSS Notes, pushing the HANA latest revision to 122.03.

      So we scrambled for resources and started a new patching project from 122.02 to 122.03. These things take time, and we managed to plan for a new project to Go-Live in Dec 2016.

      Halfway through our project in Nov 2016, we received news again from SAP that a new set of critical HotNews OSS notes were released, pushing the HANA latest revision to 122.04.

      So we scrambled again for resources to extend our project timeline to Jan 2017 with a new patching project from 122.02 to 122.04 (half of our test systems were on 122.03 already!).

      Mind you, this was still in Nov 2016.

      Halfway through our project in Dec 2016, we yet again received news from SAP that a new set of critical HotNews OSS notes were released, and that support for 122.04 would be discontinued! A new "king" - 122.05 was proclaimed! All hail the new king... I mean, revision!

      And so we scrambled for resources to again extend our project timeline for an upgrade from 122.02 to 122.05 (our test systems were patched halfway through to 122.04 - it is not funny to run a patching project with 3 different revisions in the landscape).

      Now we are praying every single day that 122.06 does not come along so soon, not at least in Q1 2017, or until we go live with 122.05 later this month in Jan 2017.

      Our patching project has turned out to be the joke of 2016. It will take a lot to restore the zero confidence that we now have in SAP HANA as a robust and viable BI analytics product.

      Author's profile photo Jens Gleichmann
      Jens Gleichmann
      Blog Post Author

      At first thanks for sharing your experience. It sounds like it was a hard project and you are now familiar with the update procedure and all bugs in SPS12 ?

      fixed in SPS12 Workaround? Note Description
      – X 2365678 Dropping a Virtual Table Fails with Error Message “unique constraint violated: Table(P_OBJECTDEPENDENCY_), Index(<index>)”
      – 0 2281937 M_DISK_USAGE hängt in TrexService::FdirRecurseDirectory
      – X 2409618 Thread Hangs in __lll_lock_wait+0x20
      – X 2408032 Reading From LOB Binary Stream After Closing the ResultSet via JDBC Fails With Error “invalid lob locator id (piecewise lob reading)”
      122.06 X 2402615 Indexserver Crash at Basis::strcasecmp When Using hdbcons With an Incomplete Subcommand
      – 0 2405212 System Crashes During Start After Hanging Situation When a Full System Info Dump was Triggered
      – X 2315085 Query with Multi-Value Parameter on Scripted Calculation View Fails with Incorrect Syntax Error
      122.06 X 2406955 Error during compiling regular expression
      – X 2404252 Hang situation during accessing M_TABLE_PERSISTENCE_LOCATIONS and savepointing
      122.06 X 2408269 Could not find temporary table error message after upgrading to SP12
      – X 2403758 HANA DB: Merge failed – Caught exception during merge of history table
      122.06 0 2415077 Indexserver Crash at DataContainer::ContainerDirectoryImpl::postcommitCreate

      There are currently 12 notes which are note fixed with 122.05.
      Currently 9 of them are having workarounds.
      4 of them are fixed starting with 122.06 (not available till now – don’t worry ? )
      Even 2 have no solution and no fix date is available

      But this is the game. Every revision has its own bugs and are the reason for continuous release of maintenance revisions. The question is if the bugs are really affecting your business. So you have to verify if you really use the affected functions.
      Sure in the last months there were a lot of critical bugs regarding possible inconsistencies. The speed of releasing this fixes is also a little bit faster compared to SPS11.

      SPS11

      RTC Revision days between
      27.10.16 112.07 49
      08.09.16 112.06 41
      29.07.16 112.05 22
      07.07.16 112.04 38
      30.05.16 112.03 48
      12.04.16 112.02 11
      01.04.16 112.01 17
      15.03.16 112  

      AVG: 32 days for one revision

      SPS12

      RTC Revision days between
      15.12.16 122.05 35
      10.11.16 122.04 30
      11.10.16 122.03 28
      13.09.16 122.02 40
      04.08.16 122.01 8
      27.07.16 122  

      AVG: 28 days for one revision
      At the end of the day only update your systems if you really hit a bug. If you always want to stay at the latest release and have a minimum of bugs, you have to update your system every 4-6 weeks!
      Happy patching ?

      Regards,
      Jens

      Author's profile photo Former Member
      Former Member

      Hi Jens

      Thanks  for the information.

      I would like to understand the End Of Support policy of SAP data bases.

      How much time there is support of DB version?

      Where could I see these details?

      BR

      Gadi

      Author's profile photo Jens Gleichmann
      Jens Gleichmann
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Gadi,

      I recently adjusted the sections. You will now find all needed information in the blog.

      HANA 1.0 SPS12 is supported till May 2021. Every new HANA 2.0 SPS has 2 years of support after release of the first revision (normally every April).

      Regards,

      Jens