Updating SAP HANA, express edition in the Cloud to play with the CAP model

Everyone is talking about the Cloud Application Programming model and you want to play with it too?

No need to feel left out! Here is one way to upgrade your HANA express database and XS Advanced tools.

This blog post is for you if:

• Your rev33 instance of HANA express is running on our cloud providers through their marketplaces (for example, I deployed mine using these instructions)
• You want to update the database and Web IDE
• You can live without using your HXE instance for 40′

I got this instance from the marketplace of one of our cloud partners, but the instructions for the local VM and binary installer are pretty much the same.

Before you begin…

I would recommend taking a snapshot/backup of your VM and adding more RAM. Also make sure your internet connection won’t interrupt the online session.

You will go for a coffee (or two) while your instance is upgrading. The size of such coffee can be smaller if you add more RAM (my VM is running at 40GB)

Open that Command Line

Yes, you’ll be using the command line, like hackers do. (Switch the font to green and impress non-tech people looking over your shoulder… )

If you are not hxeadm, become hxeadm (sudo su – hxeadm )

Add the path to Java first:

export PATH=${PATH}:/hana/shared/HXE/xs/sapjvm_8/bin

And then execute the script that is there to make your life so much easier:

/usr/sap/HXE/home/bin/HXECheckUpdate_linux.bin -a

Once it has finished, unzip the files in the downloads folder

cd /usr/sap/HXE/home/Downloads
tar -xvzf hxe.tgz
tar -xvzf hxexsa.tgz 
tar -xvzf eml.tgz 

(Not using the Extended Machine Learning library? Pretend you do and expand the component, or it won’t do the upgrade)

The unzipping will look pretty much like this for all three files:

Once you are done with the three of them, become a sudoer (hxeadm is a sudoer in the local/downloadable VM, so you don’t need to exit in that case)

exit

The fun piece:

sudo /usr/sap/HXE/home/Downloads/HANA_EXPRESS_20/hxe_upgrade.sh

You are all smart and can read what the script is asking for… especially if you have gone ninja and changed the defaults (in which case, don’t press enter):

The default password for the operating system is HXEHana1 .The rest of the passwords could also be the master password if you haven’t changed it either (again, if you take your instance a bit seriously, your admin passwords should not be the same among themselves and definitely different from the development password… and while you are at it, make a copy of the SYSTEM user and disable it).

And here is where you go for a cup of coffee (it took about 35’ in my machine, to give you an idea). You can get a glimpse of what the Cloud Application Programming model looks like from the replay of this webinar. Or get started watching any of Thomas Jung  excellent series on SAP HANA development here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoc6uc3ML1JR38-V46qhmGIKG07nXwO6X 

Wasn’t that easy?

May have taken a while, but you should get a success message saying the update process has finished successfully.

Remember you may need to wait a little bit before that “1/1” appears next to webide:

Happy coding!