Setting up SLT from ABAP 7.52 SP04 (Dev Edition) to HANA Express 2.0 SPS04

Previously in 2017, I’ve wrote a blog series about connecting the SAP NW AS ABAP 7.51 (Dev Edition) with a HANA Express instance running on the same computer as a sidecar DB but the data replication was done through a custom program and it has to be executed manually.

At that time, I recalled that I was not able to get the SLT (SAP Landscape Transformation) replication server to work locally as it would obviously be the most ideal scenario since it replicates data over to HANA automatically in real-time.

Fast forward a couple of years and with the newly available ABAP 7.52 SP04 Dev Edition, I am now able to successfully set up SLT in LTRC and have data replicated over to a HANA Express instance in real-time automatically.

Systems used in this set up (did I mention that they are provided by SAP completely FREE):

1. A running SAP NW AS ABAP 7.52 SP04 (Developer Edition) instance – You can get the complete download and installation steps in these two blog posts by Julie Plummer  https://blogs.sap.com/2019/07/01/as-abap-752-sp04-developer-edition-to-download/ https://blogs.sap.com/2019/10/01/as-abap-7.52-sp04-developer-edition-concise-installation-guide/
   Note: My instance however, was installed using the super easy method using Vagrant as described here in this blog by Alexander Tsybulsky https://blogs.sap.com/2018/09/22/installing-netweaver-as-abap-7.52-sp-01-developer-edition-with-vagrant/
2. A running SAP HANA Express 2.0 SPS04 instance – You can download and install the free version here https://www.sap.com/cmp/td/sap-hana-express-edition.html

Here are the general steps that was taken and I hope this’ll help anyone that’s also looking to set up something similar but have yet to try it.

1. Create new RFC in SM59
2. LTRC: Create a new Configuration
3. LTRC: Add a new table to Data Provisioning
4. Validation

Create new RFC

Before executing LTRC, you first need to create a new RFC to be used in the configuration set up in transaction SM59.

Note: Since the DEVELOPER user id that came with the server has an almost GOD-like access, I’ve just simply used that in this RFC. Of course, in a real-production / corporate environment, you’ll want to use a system user with very specific roles for SLT such as SAP_IUUC_REPL_REMOTE

LTRC – Create a new configuration

Once you have the RFC set up, the next step is to set up the SAP LT replication server. The transaction code to execute is LTRC.

Click on the “New” icon

Enter a Configuration Name and a Description

Select the RFC connection that was created in the earlier step as the “Source System”

Enter the details of your SAP HANA Express instance.
Note: Again, I am just simply using the default “SYSTEM” user id here (not best practice in the real world)

I used these settings as I felt they met my requirements.If you’d like to know more about these settings, you can refer to the Sizing Guide [PDF] – See page 15 and I followed the use-case for a SMALL set up

Once it is configured and set up, you should have a similar set up to my screen below and at this point, over in HANA, you should also have a new Schema created with the Configuration Name “NPL_TO_HXE“.

LTRC – Add a new table to Data Provisioning

In the ‘Table Overview’ tab, click on ‘Data Provisioning’

For this example, I used the table SBOOK as a test as I am able to later regenerate new entries easily using another SAP standard program

Once the ‘Data Provisioning’ step is done, you should get the following screen and if you press “Refresh” after a few moments, the replication step should be completed with details such as the Logging Table and Current Action should say “Replication”

I quickly used HANA Studio on Eclipse (yes, I still do…) to view the data and as you can see below, the table SBOOK is now replicated over to HANA Express under the Schema NPL_TO_HXE.
Note: Take a note to the column FLDATE as the delivered ABAP system has SBOOK entries in 2017 but that will change once we use the data generator program and generate new entries

Validation

In order to validate / test that the replication works in real-time, I ran the program SAPBC_DATA_GENERATOR in SE38 to get new records generated

Once the generator program completed, I went back to LTRC to look at the status.
At first, you should see that there are 1 table in the “Not Loaded” column together with a ‘-‘ in the Loaded column in the SBOOK row. This indicates that the updated table SBOOK has not been loaded over to HANA.

After a few short moments (seconds literally) and a “Refresh”, it showed a 1 table in the “Loaded” column with now an “X” in the Loaded column in SBOOK row.

And finally, if I look into the data contents of SBOOK in HANA this time through SAP Web IDE, I can see that the FLDATE column now contains 2019 entries and no longer 2017 entries. Woo hoo!

That’s it! Hope you’ve found it helpful / interesting in your journey to learn more on ABAP and HANA development!

Previous blog post:

https://blogs.sap.com/2017/10/28/replicating-data-into-hana-using-abap-adbc-native-sql/

UPDATE Jan 3rd 2020:

After using and having this run for a few days and adding more tables for replication (7 to be exact), I can confirm Uwe Fetzer comment below that you need to change the background work processes up from 2 to 4 in order for it to work without any issues. Thanks Uwe Fetzer!