HANA Administration: A Little More

I want to talk a bit about SAP HANA administration. Whether it’s you in the shop getting SAP HANA set up, or in our classroom learning your way around SAP HANA administration, there are three words you want to keep in mind:

Up, Running, Stable

That’s our goal in the class — to get you from not knowing about being an SAP HANA admin to the point where you can keep your system up, running, and stable. To that end, we worry about things like resource allocation, backups, configuration, and user privileges. There’s lots more to SAP HANA that we don’t get to just as a matter of time in class; some of it’s features that are useful for edge cases, some of it depends on your workload falling into particular patterns, some of it covers gee-whiz features that you don’t have a use case for.

But there are things that extend beyond up, running, and stable that you may still find useful on a day-to-day basis, and which deserve more discussion than we’ve been able to provide in class. With the class (HA200: SAP HANA Installation and Administration) unable to extend to more days, we can only include new topics if we take others out.

Or if we made another class available; one that takes builds further on up, running, and stable.

If you haven’t looked at the topic list for HA201, now might be a good time to do so. A bunch of people maybe looked past the first release of the course, which was titled SAP HANA Advanced Administration, because it sounded like a bunch of esoteric edge-case topics. But really, it wasn’t advanced, it was just a little more than we had time for in HA200.

It’s full of what I call the multi features: multi-host, multi-tenant, multi-site. Ever want to see how quickly a multi-host system with standby nodes reacts when a host machine dies? We’ll set it up and then crash it a bunch of times so you get used to the behavior. Have you been wanting to experiment with multi-tenant database containers beyond the single tenant that is now mandatory? See how those tenants can be placed on a multi-host system? We’ll mess around until it’s second nature.

How about needing the assurance that if something large and unpleasant hits your data center (fire, flood, lightning, tornado, hurricane, earthquake, tsunami, meteor strike, giant stompy monster from the ocean depths — as database administrators, our disaster recovery plans should be ready for anything), you’ll be able to continue work where you left off, even if the hardware’s been reduced to rubble? Having another site available via system replication, up to date and ready to go, sounds like something that deserves some experimentation.

None of these are advanced, but they do require a bit of play time for you to be at the level of familiarity where you can make effective use of them. Which is why a rename was in order, and why if you thought that advanced administration was not your thing, you should take a second look at HA201: SAP HANA – High Availability and Disaster Tolerance Administration. Okay, it’s a little wordy, but it gets to the heart of things nicely — we’re going to talk about ways to isolate problems and keep SAP HANA running with as little interruption as possible, which sounds an awful lot like and even better kind of up, running, and stable to me.

Look at it this way — you’re not going to implement these features perfectly the first time. Keeping your systems running will always take priority, and the time needed to practice and experiment will keep getting pushed off, and off, until the day comes when you say I sure wish we’d had some of the HA and DT features in place. So come practice on our systems for a couple of days; make your mistakes on our hardware instead of yours. Do everything enough times that you can go back to the shop, plan out your implementation, and make it work with confidence that when something unfortunate happens, you’ll be able to respond without spending all day in the docs.

HA201 is available for registration now. For the SAP HANA administrator who’s ever wondered But what happens if things stop being up, running, and stable?, it’s the best three days of training you could ever have. Check out the class schedule (don’t forget to click on the button to Load more dates and locations if you don’t see something convenient), and if you can grab a colleague or two to join you, we’ll probably be able to schedule a class when and where you like (definitely, this is one to take in person if you can — you’ll be working in groups and that’s easier when you’re all in the same room).

In the meantime, I know that you’ll keep things up, running, and stable … but with the features in HA201, it’ll be even easier.