What is really changing with SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 01? #MDC
A few days ago, SAP announced the release of SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 01. This new release includes enhancements for database management, data management, analytical intelligence and application development. You can read more about them here: What’s New in SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 01.
This release also includes another important change which will have a greater influence on the landscape configuration and sizing of SAP HANA and will definitely encourage people to become more creative and flexible with the technical architecture.
Starting with SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 01, multitenant database containers (MDC) will be the only operational mode for SAP HANA systems. This means that if you upgrade to SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 01, you will no longer be able to run a single-container HANA system.
You can read SAP HANA Multitenant Database Architecture to find out more about MDC concept. It basically consists of a system database and one or more tenant databases. System database is used for overall system administration activities and tenant databases are self-contained and completely isolated in terms of persistence layer, database catalog, repository, backups and logs.
Figure 1: High Level SAP HANA MDC Architecture
With this release, SAP is positioning MDC as a standard architecture for new HANA systems and therefore each new SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 01 installation will be in multi-container mode with one tenant database by default. If you upgrade from previous releases, the database of a single-container system will be converted into a system database and a tenant database and a new user (SYSTEM) will created in the system database (SYSTEMDB).The database superuser (SYSTEM) of the single-container system becomes the SYSTEM user of the tenant database. It is also possible to perform a near-zero downtime (NZD) update of a single-container system to SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 01 in a system replication landscape. If your databases are already running in MDC, there will not be any changes in terms of architecture.
Your existing single-container system will be converted to a multi-system database provides centralized administration tasks including create, drop, start, stop tenant databases and perform backup/recovery, monitoring, system replication activities for all tenant databases; it needs to be backed up and integrated into your backup and monitoring schedule.
After the upgrade, you need to review below settings from technical point of view and reconfigure if necessary:
- Database configuration: After the upgrade, database parameters become database specific and stored with the tenant database.
- Users: All users of the single-container system are now present in the tenant database. It would be better to check and verify them before handing the system over to business.
- Ports: Tenant database will keep the existing port numbers of the original single-container system: 3NN03 for internal communication, 3NN15 for SQL access, and 3NN08 for HTTP. System database will have the following port numbers: 3NN01 for internal communication, 3NN13 for SQL access, and 3NN14 for HTTP (via XS).
- XS advanced runtime: If you have XS advanced runtime installed, a separate xsengine process is created and the internal Web Dispatcher of the SAP HANA system routes by default to the single tenant.
If you want to find out more about the SAP HANA 2.0 (compared to version 1.0) you can have a look here: SAP HANA 2, now even more innovative and capable! I think it would be fair to name SAP HANA 1.0 as “maintenance release” and SAP HANA 2.0 as “innovation release”.
Have any questions about SAP HANA Multitenant Database Architecture?
Leave a comment below.
References and further reading:
SAP HANA Platform 2.0 SPS 01 Features
Note 2422689 – SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 01 Database Revision 010
Note 2404375 – SAP HANA Platform 2.0 SPS 01 Release Notes
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SAP HANA Multitenant Database Architecture
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We are about to build our Pre-prod and Production Hana environments on Hana 1.0 SPS12 for a go live later this year.
We expect to move to Hana 2.0 early next year and I wanted to ask you opinion if we should implement MDC from the start ( HANA 1.0) or go single container and migrate to MDC when we move to Hana 2.0.
Thanks
David Bright
Hi David, thanks for your message and sorry for my late answer as I usually am more active on LinedIn.
The move from single container to MDC is a pretty straightforward update. Even if you don't do anything now, when you upgrade to HANA 2.0 SPS01 your database will automatically be converted.
In regards to HANA 2.0, the move from HANA 1.0 and HANA 2.0 is not just a version upgrade like from Oracle 11G and 12C because HANA 2.0 is not the successor of HANA 1.0 (at least not yet).
HANA 2.0 is innovation release and HANA 1.0 is maintenance release. You should consider them as different paths and need to decide which path your business need.
SAP HANA 2 is mainly optimized for innovations and delivers a Support Package Stack (SPS) every six months. And only the last 2 Support Package Stacks are officially supported. Once SPS3 is released , the SPS1 will no longer be maintained and supported.
If you need an environment with a longer maintenance period with minimal innovations (and only maintenance updates) it would be better to stay on SAP HANA SPS 12, which will be maintained until May 2019.
Kind regards,
Alper