HANA Cockpit, get your XS engine straight !!!

During safety briefing of airlines, it is said that in case of oxygen mask use, make sure that your own mask is on first before helping others. This statement directly popped up in my mind when I tried to schedule HANA Cockpit backup from HANA cockpit. Below message was displayed when I tried to enable data backup scheduler.

This database is running without an XS Engine. Therefore it is not possible to schedule 
backups, and any already scheduled backups will not be executed. For more information, 
see the SAP HANA Database Administration Guide.

We are using HANA Cockpit as our central tool for all our HANA databases in our landscape to schedule, monitor and apply retention policy. With each HANA Cockpit version (released quarterly), SAP introduces some new functionality which makes cockpit more user friendly but still people who are used to HANA Studio find it difficult to use HANA Cockpit.

So in this blog, I will try to provide steps on how to activate backup scheduler for HANA Cockpit.

Reason

Normally, the XS engine is enabled by default in an SAP HANA system. In some cases, particularly with SAP HANA Express, the XS engine is not enabled by default, and you may need to activate the XS engine manually.

As you might be aware that HANA cockpit is built on HANA Express and due to which we are getting above message when we try to enable data backup scheduler for HANA Cockpit.

The XS engine is enabled separately for the system database and for each tenant database. I have installed standalone cockpit on completely different server but if you have installed cockpit as a tenant then you might have to perform this step in your cockpit tenant. Below is our cockpit version, so if you are using earlier version of cockpit, the functionality I have mentioned like retention policy won’t be available. Kindly subscribe SAP HANA Academy channel to stay up to date on HANA.

Steps

SYSTEM Database

For the system database, the XS engine must be enabled in the nameserver.ini file.To enable the XS engine, you can use the following SQL statements:

ALTER SYSTEM ALTER configuration ('nameserver.ini','SYSTEM') SET ('httpserver','embedded')= 'true' WITH reconfigure;

ALTER SYSTEM ALTER configuration ('nameserver.ini','SYSTEM') SET ('httpserver','workerpoolsize')= '5' WITH reconfigure;

NOTE: It is recommended that you set the workerpool size to 5 for the system database. However, if you need to schedule many backup jobs, consider increasing the value in accordance with your system requirements.

TENANT Database

For each tenant database, the XS engine must be enabled in the xsengine.ini file.To enable the XS engine, you can use the following SQL statement:

ALTER SYSTEM ALTER configuration ('xsengine.ini','SYSTEM') SET ('httpserver','embedded')= 'true' WITH reconfigure;

ALTER SYSTEM ALTER configuration ('xsengine.ini','SYSTEM') SET ('httpserver','workerpoolsize')= '5' WITH reconfigure;

So after performing above configuration, if you try to enable data scheduler for cockpit, you will get below error

HTTP request failed - {"error":{"code":null,"message":{"lang":"en","value":"{\"uuid\":\"2ea14113-a3e0-444f-96da-66cf34cf8d47\",\"errorMsg\":\"SAP DBTech JDBC: [403]: internal error: Notification of scheduler failed.\",\"errorId\":\"update job failed\",\"entityName\":\"SCHEDULE_JOBS\"}"}}}

You need to restart your database to make the changes effective. 

After restart, when you activate scheduler it will get enabled without any issue.

So when you enable data backup scheduler, it will set below parameter based on the database.

SYSTEMDB

nameserver.ini [scheduler] > enabled = true

TENANTDB

xsengine.ini [scheduler] > enabled = true

Once the scheduler is enabled, you can schedule backup of HANA Cockpit like rest of HANA databases.

References

Enable the XS Engine (XS Classic)

2546904 – Create schedule failed. Reason: SAP DBTech JDBC: [403]: internal error: Notification of scheduler failed.

Regards,

Dennis