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Author's profile photo Denys van Kempen

SAP HANA Admin FAQ (and undercover Book Review)

Want to update your admin skills for SAP HANA 2.0?

In this blog post you will find an undercover book review of SAP HANA 2.0 Administration in FAQ format.

Questions? Please post as comment.

Useful? Give us a like and share on social media.

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SAP HANA

What’s the latest and greatest book about SAP HANA administration?

We recommend SAP HANA 2.0 Administration published by SAP PRESS, quote/unquote: your one-stop shop for administering SAP HANA 2.0.

Totalling 1000+ pages (!), the book covers

  • Architecture
  • Administration tools
  • Database and instance administration
  • System replication
  • Scale-out and high availability
  • Data tiering
  • Planning and setting up the landscape
  • Installation and updates
  • Database objects
  • Working with tables
  • Security
  • Performance analysis
  • Monitoring and troubleshooting

Anything missing? Nothing I could think of.

Who are Mark and Bert?

The authors of the book

  • Mark Mergaerts – expert in SAP performance tuning, system operations and database technology. Principal technology and development consultant with Expertum (and SAP alumni).
  • Bert Vanstechelman – partner of and principal technical consultant at Expertum. Founded Logos Consulting, now a part of Expertum.

First book?

Not exactly. Mark and Bert have already written five books together for SAP PRESS, going back to 2005 about technical SAP topics like SAP S/4HANA system conversion and upgrading SAP. Bert has also written for Espresso Tutorials and the now defunct SAP Professional Journal, folded into SAPInsider.

Their experience shows as the book a well-written and includes many [TIPS!] with best practice guidance where the authors share valuable feedback.

Cloud-first, cloud-last?

Nope. Not this book. The focus of the book is entirely on the SAP HANA platform edition, on-premises that is.

What about the other admin book?

The previous SAP HANA Administration book, published by SAP PRESS back in 2014, from another duo, Lars Breddemann and Richard Bremer, is no longer available. It was written before the introduction of multi-tenant databases and the XS advanced model built-in application server, SAP HANA cockpit, and many other features and functionality. An update was overdue.

The SAP HANA 2.0 Administration book by Mergaerts and Vanstechelman is a completely new book, not a second edition.

Includes SAP HANA studio?

Prominently.

Inside SAP, the SAP HANA studio administration tool is all but forgotten and rarely mentioned since development stopped with the SAP HANA 1.0 release (SPS 12), back in 2016, followed by a deprecation notice in 2018 when feature parity was reached (according SAP HANA product management, the authors of the book disagree on this point).

However, SAP HANA studio is still supported for the latest SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 05 release and still commonly used. It will please many that in the SAP HANA 2.0 Administration book the tool is covered extensively together with the SAP HANA cockpit web UI and command line tools.

Any Juicy Quotes?

The SAP HANA Administration book is a technical book and for the most part serious reading. To lighten the load, there are plenty of print screens and figures to clarify the text and, fortunately, from time to time, the reader is also treated with some coffee-corner comments of the authors (typically  edited from official SAP publications).

  • One thing that comes up in the sales pitch of every DBMS vendor is that the system needs very little work—that it is, so to speak, self-managing. As anyone with a background in database administration or consulting in that domain can attest, self-managing database systems live in the same imaginary universe as the one in which all lunches are free. 
  • No matter how well your database is maintained, sooner or later something will go wrong. We therefore spent some time talking about database corruptions and how to handle them.
  • As if the terminology for view types isn’t already confusing enough, here is another one: you may have come across the term CDS view, where CDS stands for core data services. CDS is part of the new programming model encouraged by SAP, which pushes business logic from the application server to the database. CDS itself comes in two varieties (if you now feel dizzy, we sympathize) …

Where can we get the book?

From the SAP PRESS website and bookstore (all formats; hardcovers also sold elsewhere)

SAP PRESS is a joint initiative of SAP and Rheinwerk Publishing, located at the Rheinwerkallee in Bonn. The US subsidiary is based near Boston.

Although some SAP PRESS authors are SAP employees, many are not as with this book, which allows for different point of views. Always refreshing.

Any discounts?

Yes, there are frequent sales and specials. To be notified, follow SAP PRESS on LinkedIn and/or Twitter.

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SAP Press

Interested in writing a book yourself? For a how to guide, see

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Useful? Give us a like and share on social media.

Thanks!

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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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