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Author's profile photo Denys van Kempen
Denys van Kempen
March 15, 2018 10 minute read

C_HANATEC_13 Topics: Database Administration Tools and Tasks – by the SAP HANA Academy

LATEST UPDATE: December, 2020 =========================================

For the latest information, visit our blog post series about SAP HANA certification:

For the SAP Press Certification Success Guide, see

For the blog post, see

Introduction

This blog is part of a series to help you pass the SAP Certified Technology Associate – SAP HANA 2.0 certification exam, C_HANATEC_13.

For an overview of the exam, see

For the sample questions, see

Topic Areas

There are 10 topic areas and you can expect about 8 questions for each topic.

In this blog, I will discuss the Database Administration Tools and Tasks topic.

On the SAP Training website for C_HANATEC_13, the (somewhat obscure) exam objective for this topic is stated:

Create SAP HANA database administration guides on the day to day 
database administration tasks like starting and stopping, 
changing the configuration settings and performing table 
administration.

Study Material

The study material for this topic comes from training

Unit 5, 8 and 9 of HA200 cover the topics SAP HANA Cockpit 2.0, Administration Tools and Database Administration Tasks respectively.

SAP HANA cockpit we already covered for the Installation and Upgrade topic area.

You can download the index of the guide with the unit and lesson objectives from the SAP Training website.

These topics are also addressed in the following SAP HANA guides:

There is also an openSAP course on SAP HANA Administration

What’s New?

The focus will be on the new SAP HANA 2.0 features, so if you are new to this version you might be interested to view the What’s New videos first:

Note that C_HANATEC_13 covers SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 00 only. C_HANATEC_14 will cover SPS 02.

Administration Tools

You are expected to be (to some extent) familiar with the SAP HANA administration tools. There used to be quite a number of questions about Solution Manager but this appears to be a thing of the past. Your mileage may vary, but in HEC13 I did not count a single one.

As you might expect for a tool that’s new for SAP HANA 2.0, there were quite a number of questions about or referencing SAP HANA cockpit – a good 20% in my case – although studio also came up a couple of times.

As of SAP HANA 2.0, there has been no more development on SAP HANA studio, no more updates on the documentation, and part of the functionality (repository, XS classic development) has already been marked deprecated in the SPS 02 release. You can expect studio to quietly leave the stage of the exam in the near future.

If not mistaken, there was one question about ALM (Application Lifecycle Management), one or two about the SAP HANA interactive terminal, hdbsql, and a couple about the SAP HANA database lifecycle management tool hdblcm, and one that referenced the hardware check configuration tool, but none (0) about XS Advanced administration, Landscape Manager, Solution Manager (as mentioned) or ITOA.

For the documentation, see

HDBSQL

If you need to brush up on the hdbsql skills, you might find the following tutorial playlist of interest

There is also a blog that provides context and references

SAP HANA Academy – SAP HANA Administration: hdbsql – Getting Started

For the documentation, see

DBA Cockpit

One of the training objectives is to be able to work with the SAP (Netweaver AS ABAP) DBA cockpit. However, is it not explicitly mentioned as exam objective and I did not have any question about it (but your exam might be different). In past exams, the only questions I have seen were about scheduling backups (as this could not be done in SAP HANA studio). However, as we can now schedule backups in SAP HANA cockpit, it looks like DBA Cockpit takes the same way out as SAP HANA studio.

If you are not familiar at all with DBA cockpit, you might want to browse the documentation a bit or scan the internet for a video. Otherwise, I would not invest too much time into this subject.

For the documentation, see

SAP (Netweaver AS ABAP) DBA Cockpit

SAP Landscape Manager

For LaMa the same applies as for DBA Cockpit. It is part of the training but might not be part of the exam.

If you are new to this topic and are interested, see the blog by the product manager, Michael Hesse

For the community, see

There is also a recording available from SAP TechEd

SAP HANA Studio

Most of you will be very familiar with SAP HANA studio so you can check the boxes: perspectives, add a system, diagnosis mode. No need for any hard study here.

For those new to this tool, here is an overview from 2015.

SAP HANA Academy – SAP HANA Administration: SAP HANA Studio – Overview [2.0 SPS 00]

For the documentation, see

Start and Stop

No surprise, as an SAP HANA technician, you are expected to know how to start and stop an SAP HANA system using cockpit, HDB, and sapcontrol, start and stop tenant databases, start and stop services, but also troubleshooting an unresponsive system (unplanned maintenance).

There is a blog post about all the ins and outs of starting and stopping SAP HANA systems and tenants (on GCP but the same applies to on-premise).

Additionally, we have posted two under-the-hood blogs that cover the inner workings of the HDB system management script, and the role of sapinit and SAPStartSrv (in a lot more detail than you are expected to know for the exam).

SAP HANA Academy – Start and Stop with cockpit and studio

SAP HANA Academy – Start and Stop with HDB

SAP HANA Academy – Start and Stop with sapcontrol

For the documentation, see

Configuration

Another topic you need to master is how to configure system properties for SAP HANA.

The video below shows how this works in SAP HANA studio but the same applies to SAP HANA cockpit.

 

SAP HANA Academy – SAP HANA Administration: Configuring System Parameters

For more information, see

Database Administration Tasks

Another exam requirement is to be at ease with common database administration tasks like making a backup (for this see the Backup and Recovery section), checking system health, CPU and memory usage, alerts, sessions, statements, etc., all with focus on the SAP HANA cockpit.

SAP HANA Academy – SAP HANA cockpit

For the documentation, see

Tracing and Diagnostics

Closely related to performance monitoring is the topic of tracing and diagnostics. The objective here is that you are familiar with the several trace options and working with diagnosis information.

For the monitoring playlist on the SAP HANA Academy, see

We are will be updating this topic for the upcoming release (SPS 03).

For the documentation, see

SQL Console

For this topic, you need to know how to execute SQL in SAP HANA cockpit (using the Database Explorer), how to monitor expensive statements, and use the SQL Plan Cache.

SAP HANA Academy – Web IDE for HANA: Database Explorer

 

For the documentation, see

Table administration

For this topic, you need to know when to use a column-based and when to use row-based table storage, how to create a table, display definition and content, and how to work with table partitioning.

For the documentation, see

SAP HANA Application Lifecycle Management

This topic is about XS classic: SAP HANA content, delivery units, packages, repository, design-time/runtime objects and how to transport these between systems.

As the XS classic repository has been deprecated for release SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 02, this is probably the last exam with questions about this topic.

If you have never seen ALM for classic XS (a new UI was introduced for SPS 11), you might find the video tutorial below of interest.

ALM for XS Advanced works quite different but is not (yet) included in the exam requirements; no need to study XSA.

SAP HANA Academy – Application Lifecycle Management

For the documentation, see

References

SAP HANA Academy Playlists

SAP HANA Community Blogs

SAP Notes

SAP Help Portal (Documentation)

SAP Education

openSAP

SAP TechEd

Thank you for watching

The SAP HANA Academy provides technical enablement, implementation and adoption support for customers and partners with 1000’s of free tutorial videos.

For the full library, see SAP HANA Academy Library – by the SAP HANA Academy

For the full list of blogs, see Blog Posts – by the SAP HANA Academy

 

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