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Author's profile photo Denys van Kempen

SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 05 Highlights | SAP HANA 2.0 – An Introduction

In this blog series you will find quotes, backgrounds, suggested further readings and other information related to my latest book SAP HANA 2.0, An Introduction published by SAP Press.

In this blog we cover the SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 05 highlights.

For the blog post about the C_HANATEC certification, see

For the blog post about update and migration, see

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Long Story Short

In a previous blog, we already covered in detail what’s new and changed with the latest SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 05 release with links to blogs posted by product management, the webinar series, documentation, release notes, and more.

Below the highlights, the nuggets, the elevator pitch.
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FAQ

What is an SPS?

In a single phrase: the SAP HANA 2.0 annual release.

More verbose: SPS stands for Support Package Stack. The SAP HANA platform contains many components: database server, client, application functions, local secure store, XS advanced application server runtime, applications, runtime tools, etc.. For each component there are features and fixes. Bundle them all up and you have a got a stack of support packages. Some components like the SAP HANA cockpit or SAP HANA dynamic tiering are released separately from the SAP HANA platform and the updates are provided as Support Pack (SP).

How long is this release supported?

Good question. Five years! Upgrade to SPS 05 and you are supported until June 2025. Perfect candidate should you still have SAP HANA 1.0 releases running and need to migrate.

The currently supported SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 04 and SAP 1.0 SPS 12 releases reach end of maintenance next year in June. In other words, time of writing, there are about 10 months left to plan and perform the upgrade. For more support and maintenance information see the Product Availability Matrix.

Five years – last 2.0 release, then?

Nope. The chefs are back in the kitchen cooking up SPS 06. Probably ready some time next year. See the SAP Road Map Explorer for a sneak preview.

Runs in the Cloud as well?

Not this one. The SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 05 platform edition is for on-premises. For the cloud, there is SAP HANA Cloud. But they work great together. See Getting Started with SAP HANA Cloud (Free Trial).
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Bimodal and Hybrid

Innovation without disruption is an often-repeated mantra of SAP HANA. However, at times the rate of innovation was a bit too steep for some. For this reason, in 2017, the concept of bimodal was applied and SAP HANA was split into two releases:

  • SAP HANA 2.0 for the latest and greatest, with a steady flow of new features (every 6 months initially, later every 12).
  • SAP HANA 1.0 for the status quo, with maintenance support extended with 5 years until 2021 (SPS 12)

A little later SAP made a strategic decision to go cloud-first. For SAP HANA this meant that the focus of innovation shifted to SAP HANA “as-a-service”. However, customers no longer have to make a bimodal choice as the cloud version extends on-premises with a hybrid approach.

  • SAP HANA Cloud for the latest and greatest, with a quarterly flow of new features.
  • SAP HANA 2.0 for a more moderate pace of innovation and with 5 years maintenance support for SPS 05 (2025)

Regarding new features, we can see this reflected in the list of entries for the What’s New guide. Whereas the SPS 03 and 04 releases required about 80 pages each, for SPS 05 the page count stops at 40. Leave out SAP HANA cockpit, an optional component after all, and we have 21 pages left. Below we will cover some of the features in a bit more detail. For the complete list see guide on the SAP Help Portal.

In a nutshell:

  • Installation and Update: no major changes apart from a new tool for the hardware check.
  • Security: no major changes but several nice enhancements like JWT SSO support for remote source using SAP HANA smart data access (SDA). The Local Secure Store (LSS), introduced in the previous release, is now supported for production.
  • System administration: some new tools have been added for the administrator, for example to check the file system, verify database recovery, and to configure system parameters. Most of the changes concern the SAP HANA cockpit. Native storage extensions (NSE) is now supported for scale-out systems (feature introduced with SPS 04).
  • Development: many enhancements to existing technologies, e.g.
    • New and changed algorithms for the Predictive Analysis Library (PAL)
    • New methods for SAP HANA Spatial (and changes)
    • New GraphScript extensions
    • New hints for SQL statements with new views and syntax to support new and changed features inside the database.
    • Java API to create calculation views
    • Several updates to SAP HANA XS advanced (XSA) and the HANA Deployment Infrastructure (HDI), including to the xs command line tool, and the runtimes.
    • Enhancements to the interfaces of the SAP HANA client, e.g. JDBC/ODBC, DBSQL.

Worth mentioning are also the documentation updates. New for SPS 05 is the SAP HANA Development Metro Map and the SAP HANA Graph Reference received a significant overhaul.

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Hit the Road

Road Map Explorer

The road map for SAP HANA, platform edition not only lists what’s coming up for SPS 06 but also lists the achievements for SPS 05 (including SAP HANA cockpit).

The presentation is slightly different from the What’s New guides (with some duplicates) but maps to the same information.

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Security

Local Secure Store with KSM Support

Introduced with the previous release but as of SPS 05 supported for production environments is the local secure store (LSS). The local store allows operating system-level duties to be strictly separated between system administrators and encryption key administrators. It is called a local store because we can also use an external key management system (KSM) with current support for SAP Data Custodian.

The alternative and original implementation is the Secure Store in the File System, or SSFS, which uses the same technology as on SAP NetWeaver systems. Note that most security-related information is not stored stored in the file system but inside the database as certificates and in certificate collections (PSE).

For a bit more detail, see

Smart Data Access

SAP HANA smart data access remote sources now support single-sign on (SSO) using JSON Web Tokens (JWT). Previously only Kerberos using Microsoft Active Directory was supported for SSO, which tends to be fairly complex to set up.
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Installation and Update

Hardware and Cloud Measurement Tools

Installing the SPS 05 release is the pretty much the same as before with some minor changes:

  • You can now enable encryption for the data and log volumes before the database is created. Before this was a post-installation task.
  • To measure and analyze the hardware before the installation, we can now use the hardware and cloud measurement tools (HCMT) and no longer the hardware configuration check took (HWCCT).
  • Support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 15 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8, started with SPS 04. Minimum supported releases are SLES 12 SP4 and RHEL 7 SP6

For more information about HCMT, see SAP HANA hardware and cloud measurement tools.

For release information, see the Product Availability Matrix and 2235581 – SAP HANA: Supported Operating Systems.
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Licenses

Features and Functions

Enterprise edition, standard edition, options, capabilities, features, functions,… This is all documented in the Feature Scope Edition. No changes since the previous release.

Small print:

Editions, options, and additional capabilities mentioned in this document are subject to change without prior notice. Additional license bundles and price list items might be available.

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System Administration

New Tools

Several new tools have been added to the SysAdmin toolkit:

  • setParameter.py: console tool (Python) to configure system parameters when the system is offline or by using management tools without database access.
  • hdbrecovercheck.py: tool to check whether a desired point in time for a recovery can be reached, and whether the backups to be used are consistent.
  • hdbpersdiag: new command-line diagnosis tool to analyze physical corruptions of persistent storage.
  • srSecondaryUnregistered(): new HA/DR provider or “hook” for use with HANA System Replication (HSR) to detect when a secondary system has unregistered or when a takeover has occurred.
  • CHECK_VIRTUAL_TABLES: SQL procedure to check for mismatches between the definition of a virtual table (local) and remote table (source).

The SAP HANA Backint Agent for Amazon S3 introduces backup and recovery using cloud-based storage.

System Management Changes

Kernel Profiler is now accessible with SQL commands (ALTER SYSTEM). Previously, the less user friendly console tool hdbcons tool was required.

SQL plan cache is now configurable using system parameters and some more system parameters were added to configure the Admission Control feature of Workload Management, which defines how SAP HANA manages peak workloads.

Native Storage Extensions

Not new but as of SPS 05, native storage extensions are now also supported for multiple host systems (a.k.a. distributed and scale-out systems).

What is NSE? Native Storage Extensions (NSE) is defined as “a general-purpose, built-in” warm data store. This to contrast the data tiering technology from

  • SAP Business Warehouse extension nodes (specific-purpose) and
  • SAP HANA dynamic tiering (add-on)

The objective is similar:

  • lets you manage less-frequently accessed data without fully loading it into memory.
  • integrates disk-based or flash-drive based database technology with in-memory for an improved price-performance ratio.

For a good introduction into NSE, see SAP HANA Native Storage Extension (NSE) by Jeetendra Kapase. For the documentation, see SAP HANA Native Storage Extension

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SAP HANA Cockpit

SAP HANA Cockpit

Lots of new features are introduced with SAP HANA cockpit 2.0 SP12 (June 2020) and SP11 (November 2019). Although bundled with the SAP HANA platform, the SAP HANA cockpit is developed and released separately.

Some of the new apps are Memory Profiler, Admission Control Monitor, Buffer Cache Monitor, Memory Paging Monitor, Persistence Memory Monitor. We also have two new configuration wizards for User Groups and Audit Policies.

For some of the highlights, see What’s New in SAP HANA Cockpit 2.0 SP 12 by Danyelle Erwin

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Learn More

Documentation

For an overview see the What’s New Guide and the Roadmap Explorer. If you have a bit more time, the webinars are also still available for replay:

SAP ONE Support Launchpad

For the most detailed level of information, see the release notes for the platform, the database, the client, XS advanced, SAP HANA cockpit, etc.

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For the others posts, see

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Share and Connect

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For the author page of SAP PRESS, visit

Over the years, for the SAP HANA Academy, SAP’s Partner Innovation Lab, and à titre personnel, I have written a little over 300 posts here for the SAP Community. Some articles only reached a few readers. Others attracted quite a few more.

For your reading pleasure and convenience, here is a curated list of posts which somehow managed to pass the 10k-view mile stone and, as sign of current interest, still tickle the counters each month.

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Assigned Tags

      16 Comments
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      Author's profile photo Ahmed Ali Khan
      Ahmed Ali Khan

      Great news, Please also improve the help documentation of XSA which is not up to the mark, the example codes are not properly explained and the procedures as well.

      Author's profile photo Denys van Kempen
      Denys van Kempen
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Ahmed,

      Could you provide some examples? What guide needs improvement in your view?

      Author's profile photo Ahmed Ali Khan
      Ahmed Ali Khan

      Thanks, Denys, Appreciate that you want to know about improvements, Here are a few examples, I would like to give.

      First is, Creating FIORI Launchpad in XSA,

      https://help.sap.com/viewer/4505d0bdaf4948449b7f7379d24d0f0d/2.0.05/en-US/69fd5fc904fd4467b85818b501459ac9.html

      If you see step no. 7 and 8 of the Procedure where the guide says to download .mtar file and deploy it visa CLI tool, That can be avoided and Developer just right clicks on .mtar file Deploy->Deploy to XS Advanced.

      Second is, About Adding a ui5 app to HANA XSA FIORI Launchpad

      https://help.sap.com/viewer/4505d0bdaf4948449b7f7379d24d0f0d/2.0.05/en-US/f11324322ad445d596ec5650a6615f3c.html

      If you see the Procedure step 2, The example is given for xs-app.json
      {
      “source”: “^/app1/sap/demo/(.*)”,
      “target”: “$1”,
      “localDir”: “app1/sap/demo/”,
      “cacheControl”: “public, max-age=31536000,must-revalidate”
      }

      For a new learner, it’s very hard to understand how paths of “source”: and “localDir”:  should be mentioned if he has given the right path or not what do these paths belong to since while building the MTA project for Launchpad won’t give you any error or warning if you did something incorrectly.

       

      There are many examples like this, Hope the help guide should be more interesting in future

      Author's profile photo Denys van Kempen
      Denys van Kempen
      Blog Post Author

      Thanks, Ahmed. I will try to make your comment reach the author(s) of the guide.

      Author's profile photo Pravin Agarwal
      Pravin Agarwal

      Hi Denys,

      Could you please also confirm which Hana version has taken care of below issue as I am still facing the same in Hana 2.0 SP05 Patch 50.

      2650790 - HANA XS Advanced - XSController fails to start after renaming the Tenant -JDBCDriverException - database does not exist

      Author's profile photo Denys van Kempen
      Denys van Kempen
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Pravin,

      The note states:

      The XS Advanced Runtime is not able to technically detect if a tenant DB was renamed “under the hood” (without knowledge of XSA itself). That means, this behavior is a know restriction. 

      This is similar to deleting the database data files from the file system without telling HANA first that you want to delete the database. There is no patch going to fix this. It is just not how we should interact with the system.

      Note 2498273 – Restrictions of SAP HANA 2.0 XS advanced SPS 02 mentions some workarounds; this does not apply to your situation?

      Author's profile photo AJAYKUMAR SUGUMARAN
      AJAYKUMAR SUGUMARAN

      Hi Denys,

      Thank you for an excellent article! Could you please help answer below:

      1. We're migrating from SAP Hana 1.0 SP12 to SAP Hana 2.0 SP5, and planning to continue to use Hana Studio, without migration to XSA. Is there any adjustment to our Hana views needed in Hana studio after migration to Hana 2.0 SP5?
      2. Are there any new features in Hana Studio that we could leverage after migration to SAP Hana 2.0 SP5?

       

      Author's profile photo Denys van Kempen
      Denys van Kempen
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Ajaykumar,

      Good question.

      Let’s recall that development stopped for SAP HANA studio with the SAP HANA 1.0 SPS 12 release in 2016 and that the tool was marked as deprecated with the SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 02 release in 2018 with the remark SAP continues support with SAP HANA 1.0 SPS 12 and SAP HANA 2.0 but that it will be removed from “later versions” of SAP HANA, cf. note

      In other words, you cannot use studio for SAP HANA Cloud but the tool continues to be supported for the next 5 years for SPS 05 (and possibly beyond).

      To answer your questions:

      • Adjustment needed?
        • Concerning the tool: probably not, but this would be easy to find out as you can use the latest SAP HANA studio version today with the SAP HANA 1.0 SPS 12 release.
          As mentioned development stopped, so the only thing changed between the SAP HANA studio versions released this year and the version of 2016 are patches and fixes. No new development.
        • Concerning the calculations views: it may very well be that certain syntax and functionality work different on the latest SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 05 release database compared to SAP HANA 1.0 SPS 12. You would have to check the release notes.
      • Development stopped with SPS 12 so no new features (nor any user interface support for all new 2.0 functionality,

      See

      • https://blogs.sap.com/2020/01/18/sap-hana-2.0-highlights-sap-hana-2.0-an-introduction/

       

      Author's profile photo Alexandru Neogescu
      Alexandru Neogescu

      Hi Denys

       

      Thanks for sharing these information with us also for your dedication writing these articles!

      I'm looking for some help into a particular area, Smart Data Access and I believe you could have some indications for me there.

      I have several projects in order to consume AWS Redshift and AWS S3 data with SAC (SAP Analytics Cloud) but I want to blend these data with some HANA/BW data.

       

      The solution I have found was to use SDA as data federation solution in HANA and do my visualization with the help of HANA calculation views.

       

      The point is, I'm not sure SDA supports AWS Redshift and AWS S3 (ODBC).

      • Theoretically this should work, this is what I have found on AWS: Redshift and here S3
      • I have seen already an implementation on Google Big query also a blog here 

      Could you please help me with some ideas here?

      I don't want to waist a lot of time and energy o something would not work. (HANA version 2.0 SP04, but soon SP05).

       

      Warm Regards

      Alex

       

      Author's profile photo Denys van Kempen
      Denys van Kempen
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Alexandru Negoescu,

      You are welcome; thanks.

      The first AWS reference for Redshift leverages SAP Data Services, ETL technology that originates from ActaWorks via BusinessObjects. Connects to both RedShift and S3 but this is a separately licensed product. Support information (PAM)

      SAP HANA Smart Data Integration (SDI) implements this technology with the limitation of SAP HANA as sink/target. For SAP HANA Cloud, SDI is included. For the platform edition, it is a licensed option.

      With SAP HANA Cloud you can connect directly to AWS S3 and Athena (REST API) using SAP HANA smart data access. However, according to the note this is not supported for the platform

       

      Author's profile photo Vineeth Damodar
      Vineeth Damodar

      Hello Denys,

       

      Thank you for the elaborate introduction.

      One question - in the start you have mentioned the link for - 100% Free Blogpost about SAP HANA, C_HANATEC (Braindumps and Cheat Sheets)

       

      However, I get the response - Sorry, you are not allowed to access this page.

      Do we need some special permissions?

       

      Thank you

      Regards,

       

      Vineeth

      Author's profile photo Denys van Kempen
      Denys van Kempen
      Blog Post Author

      Fixed! [wrong URL]

      Thanks for pointing this out, Vineeth!

      • https://blogs.sap.com/2020/10/31/100-free-blogpost-about-sap-hana-c_hanatec-with-braindumps-and-cheat-sheets/
      Author's profile photo AJAYKUMAR SUGUMARAN
      AJAYKUMAR SUGUMARAN

      Hi Denys,

      We're in the process of upgrading from SAP Hana 1.0 SP12 to 2.0 SP05 (without XSA/ SAP Hana Web IDE) option. We plan to continue to use our existing Hana Studio. However, we plan to leverage the SAP Hana cockpit option with our upgrade.

      1. Does the SAP Hana Cockpit come with an automatic (standard) option to install as part of the DB upgrade? (meaning, does it need any additional programming/technical knowledge by the Basis resource for the SAP Hana Cockpit installation?)
      2. We have enterprise license for SAP Hana. Does installing of SAP Hana Cockpit need any additional licensing, cost, or any hardware requirements?

      Thanks,

      Ajay

       

      Author's profile photo Denys van Kempen
      Denys van Kempen
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Ajay,

      You can see SAP HANA cockpit as a package containing the express edition database, the XSA runtime plus a few applications like cockpit and database explorer. It is also possible to add cockpit to an existing SAP HANA system (which will add the XSA runtime + apps)

      To answer you questions

      1. SAP HANA cockpit is a separate product and does not come bundled with the SAP HANA platform edition. You will need to download cockpit and install. Those familiar with an SAP HANA installation will have no problems installing cockpit (but read the documentation first!)
      2. SAP HANA cockpit is not a licensed product. For production, a dedicated system would be the most typical (hardware requirements are those of the express edition, not the platform)

       

      SAP PRESS has made a free sample chapter available for the certification success guide, which is all about SAP HANA cockpit; this should give you a good idea about the product

      Otherwise, I also wrote a blog post specifically about SAP HANA cockpit which you may find of interest

      Author's profile photo AJAYKUMAR SUGUMARAN
      AJAYKUMAR SUGUMARAN

      Thank you Denys! Is there any SAP documentation on the known issues when upgrading to 2.0 SP5 and/or the workarounds for the same?

       

      Thanks,

      Ajay

      Author's profile photo Denys van Kempen
      Denys van Kempen
      Blog Post Author

      Yes, and I have put it all in a blog post for you

      • https://blogs.sap.com/2020/09/27/sap-hana-update-upgrade-and-migration-sap-hana-2.0-an-introduction/

      See also

      • https://blogs.sap.com/2020/06/26/sap-hana-2.0-sps-05-installation-and-update-hands-on/