Hana on The Lars Breddemann Blog

SAP Factory Calendar in Snowflake

Thu, 04 May 2023 08:52:07 +0000

Analysing the data in SAP systems can be done in many ways. While SAP would like all customers to use the tools from their portfolio, many customers prefer to use other platforms. Snowflake is arguably one of the most popular choices for that. If getting the SAP tables into a different data platform would be all that is needed to start writing SQL queries and getting answers, I suspect a lot more SAP customers would move their analytics stack. Alas, it is not that easy at all. SAP’s database design is peculiar and littered with design choices from decades long past, when saving a few bytes in storage could greatly improve the system’s performance or reduce it’s resource consumption.

Answers Pinboard

Mon, 19 Dec 2022 04:33:45 +0000

Apart from writing blog posts I have written answers to many questions on several Q&A sites like StackOverflow and SAP Community. Some of those answers received good feedback and/or the answer surprised me once I worked it out.

SAP HANA middle of the road for Big Data or just average?

Sun, 14 Aug 2022 12:41:02 +0000

When SAP tries to explain HANA as a technology the buzz words “Big Data” have always been part of the story.
Commonly “Big Data with HANA” then gets specified to mean one or another thing - often to caveat what the platform is supposed to be able to do and which usage scenarios require what sort of special handling.

Why are your scalar UDFs slow? (mine aren't)

Mon, 09 Nov 2020 07:29:53 +0000

What is this about? #

In his blog post Why are scalar UDFs so slow? Jörg Brandeis wonders why user defined scalar functions (scalar UDFs) are slow compared to plain SQL. This is an important question since UDFs would make for very convenient development objects. SQL could be a lot easier to read and maintain if one could put complex or often reused computations into an UDF and just use this in queries, procedures and BW transformations.

DBeaver log files: beware and free up disk space

Wed, 04 Nov 2020 06:50:02 +0000

Remember my post from earlier in April 2020? (Getting data into HANA - the easy way)

In it, I described how to use DBeaver to load CSV files into HANA quick and hassle-free. For DBeaver activities like importing or exporting data are so-called Database Tasks. For every execution of a task, DBeaver keeps a log file and these log files can be easily accessed via the Database Tasks Eclipse View:

Getting data into HANA - the easy way

Fri, 04 Sep 2020 04:45:21 +0000

In a recent blog post SAP presented several ways to load data into a HANA instance. The main approach shown was to use a combination of Python, SQLAlchemy, and Pandas (a Python data analysis library) as well as the Python-specific version of the SAP HANA client driver.

One in a Million

Sat, 08 Feb 2020 03:45:03 +0000

Q&A forums can be a treasure trove of interesting questions that turn out to have counter-intuitive answers.

In “Why does select statement taking too long when primary key is present?” the OP made an interesting observation:

Machine learnings of hana, odbc, and macos

Wed, 15 Jan 2020 10:02:54 +0000

One of the benefits of answering questions from users is that there usually is a pretty good chance that I will learn something along the way. Today’s case was no different. In fact, I learned quite a bit.

[NTM] HANA STUDIO NoClassDefFoundError: javax/xml/soap/SOAPException

Wed, 06 Nov 2019 05:48:46 +0000

Sometimes, when I am looking for the solution to a problem by googling, I find my own blog posts or forum replies. These found-again solutions are one of the nice returns from prolonged activity in forums and usually a reminder of how much my detail memory behaves like a colander sometimes…

New year, same issues and some tips.

Tue, 08 Jan 2019 04:34:44 +0000

Most folks working with SQL DBs for a while will likely come to see how beginners in this area struggle with “declaritive code” and “tell the DB what you want not how to do it”

IF EXISTS would exist

Wed, 28 Nov 2018 04:54:55 +0000

A recurring question of folks using SAP HANA is how to only run a DROP command for objects that actually exist in the database. One could argue that the effect of executing DROP does not depend on whether the object to be dropped exists, because after running the command it will not be there either way, but there is a bit more to it.

HANA in a pocket, a skull and some dirty hands on Linux

Sun, 03 Jul 2016 14:00:00 +0000

DISCLAIMER: this blog describes unsupported and unlicensed use of the SAP HANA software. I describe my personal try-out of a hardware/software combination. It’s not in any way meant to be used productively or recommended to use the software in the way I describe.
If you loose data, waste life-time, money, your good mood or damage anything while trying to do what I describe: that’s all on you and there’s no guarantee, warranty or liability whatsoever from SAP or myself.

Things keep changing around here!

Tue, 16 Feb 2016 13:00:32 +0000

Fellow Community members, readers and otherwise interested!

Today I share a change in the organisation of this community. Last week I returned the moderator and space editor privileges and the duties that come with those.

Show me the timelines, baby!

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 14:00:26 +0000

Based on revision 46 (SPS 5) of SAP HANA Studio and Database

Hello once again!

While reading through the recently released SPS 05 RKT material (here) (that is, IF you have access to this RKT material), specifically the “What’ New Admin & Monitoring” document I found that the authors mentioned that the plan visualization feature we got in SPS 04 had been improved by adding an execution timeline to the display.