Learning Bite #10 – Highlighting three of the new HANA 2.0 SPS 05 latest features (June 2020 Update)

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A worthy update to celebrate 10 years of SAP HANA: HANA 2.0 SPS 05

Over the past 10 years, I have seen my clients migrate to SAP HANA to deliver business value in innovating and interesting new ways. SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 05 is an amazing update that features many great security, administration, analytical processing, data replication and backup capabilities.

On June 26th, SAP has released its support package stack (SPS) 05. In this learning bite, I explore three (3) features newly introduced in the SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 05 version. SAP has also launched a series of webcasts highlighting the new and changed features in the new SPS 05 version “What’s New with SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 05 Webcasts”. The webcasts cover wide range of interesting topics including calculation view modeling,, HANA administrations & Security, and hybrid scenarios with SAP HANA Cloud. I recommend to check them out.

1. Backup SAP HANA database to Amazon S3

AWS Backint Agent is a free service. You pay for only the underlying AWS services that you use, for example Amazon S3. With AWS Backint Agent for SAP HANA, you can backup your SAP HANA databases to Amazon S3. You can now quickly build new SAP HANA database copies or refresh your existing SAP HANA database using backup data stored in Amazon S3. By integrating with SAP HANA Backint API, AWS Backint Agent can utilize SAP HANA’s built-in backup processes to meet your Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO).

With Amazon S3 storage, S3 Cross-Region Replication, and other AWS compute and networking services, you can create Disaster Recovery architectures in order to quickly and easily recover your SAP HANA database from outages caused by natural disasters, system failures, and user errors.

2. Support the definition of privileges when accessing a search view

When search views contains confidential information, you should conceal some sensitive information from the users and only grant them the appropriate level of access. In order to do this concealing activity, you can either use the database features like SQL-based privileges or manage access through the application layer (i.e. manage access through the application layer that runs the search application on top of the SAP HANA database). In this second scenario, the newly introduced feature (AUTH: operator) can be used by the search application to define the access privileges of the user that executes a search.

The AUTH: operator has been added to the query language to define the access privileges and to make sure that the search criteria & access restrictions are considered in all steps of the sys.esh_search() processing to get the final correct search results. This means that the privileges are applied to the search step in the correct way and they are also applied to all other calculations that follow to create the final search result.

3. Check that a Recovery to a Point in Time is Possible

Using the new and improved Python tool hdbrecovercheck.py, you can now check whether a desired point in time for a recovery can be reached (i.e. RPO), and whether the backups to be used are consistent. This tool can be used both for file-based backups and backups created with third-party backup tools.

The hdbrecovercheck.py tool checks all the resources required (backups and log area) for a recovery to a specific point in time to verify whether they: exist and can be accessed. The tool now also gives you the option to check the consistency of the backups on volume level, page level and all hosts for all services.

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The views, information or opinions expressed in this short article are views of my own.  All information in this article is provided “as is”, with no guarantee of completeness, accuracy, timeliness or of the results obtained from the use of this information.