Hello and welcome to the SAP HANA Academy.
The topic of this video tutorial series is SA P HANA 2.0 SPS 02 - What’s New
and in this video we will discuss database backup and recovery and the SAP HANA cockpit.
Hi, I am Denys van Kempen.
I already mentioned in the previous video of this series,
that development had about 7 weeks for this SPS 02 release
and we hear product management sometimes referring to it as a minor release.
What do we have on the table?
In the release notes, for database backup and recovery, there is only one feature mentioned:
SAP Business Warehouse Extension Nodes,
and, but this is really minor minor, the documentation no longer uses the term storage snapshot
but, from now on, this will be data snapshot.
Here we have the backup and recovery menu in HANA studio with the manage storage item.snapshot
In HANA cockpit, the same thing is called a data snapshot and this is the term that will be used,
going forward.
Data snapshot, by the way, you can only create using SQL with the ‘backup data create snapshot’ command.
When you query the backup catalog, the identifier, the entry type name, is also data snapshot.
So, it is really more about making the documentation consistent.
SAP HANA studio, in case you missed the message, is no longer under active development.
No new features have been added since the initial release of SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 00
back in May 2016.
So, don’t expect the text in the HANA studio UI to change to reflect this change of terminology.
It will not.
Back to our release notes.
Fortunately, we also have the topic of backup and recovery listed among the SAP HANA cockpit
SP 03 features.
Cockpit, for those not familiar, in HANA 2.0 has a different release cycle.
It is no longer coupled to the SAP HANA platform edition release,
allowing for a faster pace of innovation, bringing the features to the market a bit quicker.
With SAP HANA SPS 02, cockpit SP 03 was released with two new features:
database copy and backup encryption.
Let’s start with the last topic: backup encryption.
In the previous What’s New video about database backup and recovery for SPS 01, backup encryption
is explained in some detail, so I will not repeat that here.
If you are new to the topic, please take a look at that video:
it is in the What’s New SPS 01 playlist.
In that video, I already predicted that we would probably get a switch to turn backup
encryption on and off in HANA cockpit.
Now, guess what?
If we open HANA cockpit and connect to an SPS 02 release, we can now enable backup encryption
with the flick of a switch.
Easy does it.
You can also click the tile.
The Data Encryption Configuration screen or app, some would say, will open and here you
can also enable backup encryption.
Does the same thing, of course.
What’s very convenient is that we now also have a link Manage Keys
and here you can see the active version of the root key, change the root key, back it up,
and set a root key backup password.
We will cover this in the What's New video about security and also create a couple of
new videos about backup and recovery for SAP HANA 2.0 to show you the exact sequence of
steps on how you would go about this in a real life system.
So, stay tuned.
That’s it for backup encryption in the HANA cockpit.
The other cockpit topic is database copy.
If we go up a bit on the cockpit overview screen in the database management link section,
we now have this copy database link.
Select it and you will be prompted to select the copy type: full data backup or data and log.
The first allows you to restore, of course, the second to recover
- for those initiated in the science of database backup and recovery.
You would need log backups to do a PITR (point in time recovery).
So, when you select the one with logs,
you can then specify which time and which time zone.
Enter or select.
I will pick Abidjan
- same timezone as UTC -
but take Bujumbura, for example, and HANA will display that it is 2 hours later than UTC.
In step 3 you need to provide the location of the backup catalog on the file system.
The name backup copy maybe suggests
that you can copy and paste a database from one system to the next.
Well, sort-of.
What you are doing, in fact, is restoring a database backup from one system to the next.
At least, that would be the most likely scenario.
Restoring a database typically, however, is a fairly sensitive operation.
There are a number of conditions that need to be respected.
This is all documented in the SAP HANA Administration Guide, of course, section
Copying a Database Using Backup and Recovery.
Here we have the prerequisites.
Couple of text boxes with caution,
some points to note and SAP notes to consider,
and then there are also the steps after copying a database.
So, not exactly copy-and-paste.
Before proceeding, you might want to read up on the topic, and, as mentioned, we will
include a video on this for the backup and recovery playlist, here on the Academy.
Step 4 would ask for the backup catalog and in step 5 you would then pick the one you
want to use, stop the database and perform the restore or recover.
The point here is that we now have a link in the database administration section where
we easily start this process.
It is now web-enabled, in fact.
Before, this was SQL only.
Back to the release notes, that’s it for HANA cockpit.
For HANA SPS 02, as mentioned, we only have the BW extension nodes.
Now, what’s that?
Here we have an illustration from the the SAP BW/4HANA guide.
Business Warehouse, BW, systems tend to be large systems.
Lots of data.
Not every piece of data is equally relevant and we see that the suggestion of different
data temperatures is proposed: hot, warm, cold.
Hot data is stored in-memory: current data, real time access required.
Cold data, you can move to Hadoop or SAP IQ.
In between, we have warm data. We might need it from time to time but it is not worth the
premium of in-memory access.
You could use the SAP HANA data tiering option
but today this is not always possible in each and every use case.
So, as an alternative, we also have extension nodes.
There is lots of information on this topic, here in the guide, and I will put some links
in my What’s New blog on database backup and recovery.
It would get us way of topic, to discuss this in any detail but the point is that with extension nodes,
you add additional HANA hosts to a system but with different sizing applied so
more memory can be used.
The way that this is implemented is with the notion of worker groups.
If I would launch the installer, SAP HANA lifecycle management, and skip a couple of
screens until we get to the multiple-host installation type and then add a host, here we can see
the worker group field.
You can also set it after the installation, of course.
Here, configure system properties: nameserver.ini > landscape.
The default is 'default' but for BW extension nodes, you would have to use ‘worker_dt’.
Here we have this documented in note 2453736: How-To: Configuring SAP HANA for SAP BW Extension
Node in SAP HANA 2.0
Now, why do I mention all this in a video about backup and recovery?
Well, prior to SPS 02, there was no way to find about what worker group a backup belonged
to and this brought some challenges during recovery.
This has been fixed.
You can actually use the hdbbackupdiag diagnostic tool to dump the backup header file and here
we see the worker group reported.
Two new options, new flags, have been added to the RECOVER DATABASE and RECOVER DATA statements,
for the same purpose: IGNORE WORKERGROUPS.
This means, that in case your backup has a different value for workergroup than the target
system you want to recover to, in the past this was an issue: recovery would fail.
Now, you can overrule this.
Again, this all applies to BW extension nodes.
If you are not using them, it is not relevant but if you are, you probably happy to hear
about the extend support for worker groups in SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 02.
So much for database backup and recovery.
Extended support for BW extension nodes, database copy and backup encryption UI enhancements
for HANA cockpit; that’s it in a nutshell.
For more information with links to the documentation and other resources,
please check out my blog on this topic.
You can find more video tutorials on our YouTube channel.
If you would like to be informed about new video tutorials, please subscribe to our channel.
You can connect with us on LinkedIn or follow us on Twitter, as well for updates.
And we also have a page on Facebook and Google+.
If you are watching this video on YouTube, do not hesitate to leave your comments to
the video page and, if you like, give us your vote on his video.
Thank you for watching.