Technical Articles

Roman Gorbenko

August 20, 2020 4 minute read

SAP HANA SPS upgrade step-by-step guide

Introduction.

Basis Administration in the Age of SAP HANA requires new skills from SAP Basis Administrators. One of them HANA DB Maintenance & Upgrade. For example, SPS updates should be installed at regular intervals to avoid errors and to keep your Database up to date

Prerequisites for HANA DB Upgrade.

You want to install a new SPS on SAP HANA database. For example, in EWA report you found

“SAP HANA database: Support Package has run out of security maintenance. Support with SAP Security Notes is no longer ensured.”

and

Resolution.

Corrections are shipped in the form of Revisions and Support Packages Stack (SPS) of the product’s components. We start from DEV landscape

Step 1. Preparation phase.

Step 1.1 What’s New

Check What’s New in SAP blog-posts and Webinars

For example, if we want Upgrade from SPS03 to SPS05

Related Blogs:

What’s New in SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 04

https://blogs.sap.com/2019/04/05/whats-new-in-sap-hana-2.0-sps-04-2/

What’s New in SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 05

https://blogs.sap.com/2020/06/26/whats-new-in-sap-hana-2.0-sps-05-2/

Related Webinars:

What’s New in SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 04

https://event.on24.com/eventRegistration/EventLobbyServlet?target=reg20.jsp&partnerref=hanablog&eventid=1944951&sessionid=1&key=49A5CD6AF833C1BD9078097A62A81682&regTag=465648&sourcepage=register

What’s New in SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 05

https://event.on24.com/eventRegistration/EventLobbyServlet?target=reg20.jsp&referrer=&eventid=2427836&sessionid=1&key=4AAFD3A3D369650123640A433A1B4C27&regTag=1152343&sourcepage=register

Step 2.2 Libraries updating

New SPS version may require a new version of Linux libraries in your system

Without required libraries updating process interrupt with error (for example)

“Cannot access required library ‘/opt/rh/SAP/lib64/compat-sap-c++-9′”*

* compat-sap-c++ – provides additional runtime compatibility libraries required by newer SAP NetWeaver / SAP HANA releases. These libraries are installed independently of the standard runtime

libraries provided by RHEL.

Installation of compat-sap-c++ requires a “Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions” subscription

Resolution for RHEL

Log in to your RedHat account
Go to Subscriptions tab
Copy Pool ID to clipboard

in RHEL CLI:

subscription-manager register –username=XXX –password=YYYY

Attach to pool

subscription-manager attach –pool=<pool id from clipboard>

3.Enable all sap* repositories for this system

subscription-manager repos –enable=”*sap*”

Output:

Now system ready to install libraries

yum install compat-sap-c++-9

yum install libatomic

check version

rpm – q compat-sap-c++-9 libatomic

Links:

How to subscribe RHEL 7 SAP HANA system to Extended Update Support (EUS) channel?

https://access.redhat.com/solutions/2318061

Overview of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Applications subscription

https://access.redhat.com/solutions/34169

Step 2.3 Backup

Backup SysetmDB and all tenants

Step 2.4 Update strategy and Media Download

For example, if you have SAP HANA SPS03 you can upgrade the system to SPS05 in one step.

Don’t forget about the installed plugins. Check installed Plug-ins in Hana Studio or DBACockpit transaction.

Find SPS on SAP Launchpad. For example, if you want upgrade to SPS05:

Download SAR archives with a correct version of plug-in from Launchpad too

NB: For HANA DB Rev51 ->LCAPPS plugin must be Rev51 version too

Step 2.5 Media Upload

1. Upload SAR archives to HANA DB server.

2. Extract files from SAR archives.

3. Important moment. Structure after extracting procedure must be separated like:

Step 2.6 Check disk space

Check free space at the mount point /hana/shared/<SID>

Without required free space updating process interrupt with error /hana/shared/<SID> “NOT ENOUGH SPACE LEFT”

For example, updating procedure from SPS03 to SPS05 required 9.5GB of free space at /hana/shared/<SID>

N.B. For partitions in ext3/ext4 you can extend size “on the fly”

Find bindings between mount point /hana/shared/<SID> and volume group / logical volume

lsblk

For example, extend size on 10GB

lvextend -L +10G /dev/<volume group>/<lodical volume>

xfs_growfs /dev/<volume group>/<lodical volume>

Step 2.7 Stop systems

Stop SAP systems running on HANA DB.

AAS -PAS – ASCS (SCS) – ERS

NB: stopsap j2ee *for Java systems

stopsap R3 *for ABAP systems

2 . Stop HANA DB

NB: su – <sidadm>

HDB stop

NB: Average time for HANA DB stopping: 5-20 minutes (this measure depends on the DB-size).

Step 2. Update phase.

Run command from root privileges from a folder with extracted HANA SPS-files,

/<extracted path>/SAP_HANA_DATABASE/hdblcm –ignore=check_signature_file (minus,minus)

HDBLCM found components for updating:

Updating procedure:

Step 3. Post update phase.

Step 3.1 Check new version

NB: su – <sidadm>

HDB version

Step 3.2 Start systems

HANA DB already started automatically at this point so time to start application server in reserve sequence

ERS – ASCS (SCS) – PAS – AAS

NB: startsap j2ee *for Java systems

startsap R3 *for ABAP systems

Step 3.3 Consistency check

Log-in in your SAP system to 000 client and check output of transaction SICK

Conclusion.

Repeat steps above for HANA DB in QAS system and after additional approvals in PROD landscape.

SAP BASIS Routine task with examples from real life was provided

5 Comments

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Satish Kumar Prasad

August 23, 2020 at 3:31 am

Nice Info !

João Dimas

December 18, 2020 at 2:28 pm

Hello,

Attention! I believe you forget something very important.

The command is not hdblcm –ignore=check_signature_file

The right command is the following one (with two hyphen symbol (-) and not only one): hdblcm - -ignore=check_signature_file

Keep in mind that in linux you need to use the following command:

./hdblcm - -ignore=check_signature_file (put both hyphen together)

Read the following sap note for all the details about this command and other things regarding this specific procedure:

2078425 – Troubleshooting note for SAP HANA platform lifecycle management tool hdblcm

Thank you,
João Dimas – SAP ADM

Maurizio Bai

November 30, 2021 at 11:16 am

Hello

Does the SPS upgrade require any testing as far as application side is concerned or it's just a technical matter that can be sorted out by Basis Team w/o any concern?

Thanks!

Partha Ghosh

May 1, 2022 at 5:53 pm

I think in "Updating procedure" step you need to add some more steps or selecting all (1) option is enough?

Michael Ocasio

July 7, 2022 at 8:23 pm

We have a multi-Tenant platform for DEV and QA and Isolated Instance for PRD.

The following code works in DEV and QA but not in PRD. We went from SAP HANA 2.0.03 TO 2.0.05

I had check the configuration settings for SQLScript nothing out of the ordinary missing. What can it cause for this feature not to work...... Note: all other new features from 03 works in 05.

Could not execute 'DO BEGIN DECLARE CURSOR cur FOR SELECT * FROM employees FOR UPDATE IGNORE LOCKED; FOR ...' in 92 ms 676 µs .

SAP DBTech JDBC: [7]: feature not supported: ."(DO statement)": line 3 col 14 (at pos 115): Linked Database can not be supported: EMPLOYEES

CREATE TABLE employees (employee_id INTEGER, employee_name VARCHAR(30));
INSERT INTO employees VALUES (1, 'John');
INSERT INTO employees VALUES (20010, 'Sam');
INSERT INTO employees VALUES (21, 'Julie');
INSERT INTO employees VALUES (10005, 'Kate');

DO BEGIN
DECLARE CURSOR cur FOR SELECT * FROM employees FOR UPDATE;
FOR r AS cur DO
IF r.employee_id < 10000 THEN
UPDATE employees SET employee_id = employee_id + 10000
WHERE CURRENT OF cur;
ELSE
DELETE FROM employees WHERE CURRENT OF cur;
END IF;
END FOR;
END;