Highlights from the HANA 2.0 SPS 05 Administration, Monitoring and Security Webcast (July 14th, 2020)

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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. Check out my learning bite post around this update.

On June 26th, SAP has released its HANA 2.0 SPS 05. With the SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 05 release, a new SAP HANA Cockpit was also released SP 12 (i.e. to synchronize with SAP HANA). It is important to note that the SAP HANA Cockpit periodically releases Support Packages (SP) delivering new functionality as well as fixes and security patches.

Highlights from the HANA 2.0 SPS 05 Administration, Monitoring and Security Webcast

SAP has 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.

On July 14, 2020, SAP hosted a webcast around the new features within the HANA 2.0 SPS 05 Administration, Monitoring and Security capabilities. In this 7-minutes post, I cover some of the highlights from this

(1) Configure a database restart only for when changing a parameter is required

This is a nice little feature but especially important. With the new update, there is no need to guess whether the parameter requires restarting or not. In Cockpit SP12, “Restart Required” dialog will alert you for configuration parameter changes requiring a database restart for applicable configuration changed. Also, HANA 2.0 SPS05 provides option to restart database immediately or later manually.

(2) Enhancing the Cockpit Manager security capabilities

In the Cockpit Manager, there are few nice new features coming in this SPS 05. Single sign-on (SSO) with Kerberos login support to the SAP HANA cockpit (only to the SAP HANA Cockpit). You can also temporarily deactivate SAP HANA Cockpit users. When a user is deactivated, its credentials/privileges is saved in case you want to re-activate the account later.

Additionally, when you export the registered resources, specifically technical & system accounts, to .json file, a password field called “technicalPwd” is created in the import file and is left as blank. In previous versions of HANA, you would normally be prompted for the password during the import process, however, to speed import process, you can edit the .json file and add the password manually; it is not recommended to save the password but it is an option for HANA administrator today.

(3) Configuring User Groups in the SAP HANA Cockpit

The new HANA Cockpit comes with a new configuration wizard that helps you configure the three user groups: Administrator User Group, Technical User Group and Normal User Group. You can assign users and create separate password and lockout policies for each of the group and assign different users/resources through this easy to use wizard.

(4) Configuring SAP HANA Audit Policies through SAP HANA Cockpit

This is another easy to use configuration wizard coming with the new SAP HANA Cockpit. You can now use the wizard to apply basic HANA audit policies configuration. Also, an additional feature is coming with the wizard, which is introducing some of the basic recommended HANA Audit policies pre-configured. You can edit the audit policies configurations once created.

You can check my HANA Audit Policies Well-Controlled post and HANA Audit Policies Learning Bites for details on what audit policies to configure.

Bringing it all together,

The above items are just a glimpse of what is introduced in HANA 2.0 SPS 05. I am extremely interested to hear more about the different upcoming webcast and make sure you check them out too. Check out the webcast series from here.

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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.