SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.2 SP08 (SAP BI 4.2 SP8) Released!

[Patrick_Perrier]

Source: Webi4Me

SAP BusinessObjects 4.2 SP08 Released

February 24th, 2020

Oh well I had this all planned for a Feb 14th release and ready to wish you all a Happy Valentines's Day ? but that wasn't meant to be.

Nearly a year after the release of SAP BI 4.2 SP07, I'm happy to announce today the latest Service Pack aka Support Package for SAP BI 4.2 - version 14.2.8.3426.

Released few days late according to the Q1 2020 Maintenance Schedule:

10/02/2020:



19/02/2020:

Source: Maintenance Schedule

Previous SAP BI 4.2 Support Pack releases:

• December 2017: SAP BI 4.2 SP05

• July 2018: SAP BI 4.2 SP06

• March 2019: SAP BI 4.2 SP07

What was released?

The usual suspects were released for a fresh Installation or Support Package:

• SBOP BI Platform 4.2 SP08 Server

• SBOP BI Platform 4.2 SP08 Client Tools

• SBOP BI Platform 4.2 SP08 Live Office

• SBOP BI Platform 4.2 SP08 Integration for SharePoint

• SBOP BI Platform 4.2 SP08 NET SDK Runtime

• SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards (Xcelsius) 4.2 SP08

• SAP BusinessObjects Explorer 4.2 SP08

• SAP Crystal Server 2016 SP08

• SBOP BI Platform 4.2 SP08 Crystal Reports for Enterprise

• SAP Crystal Reports 2016 SP08

What's New?

This is hopefully not coming as a surprise as it has been mentioned several times over the last few months but this Service Pack is not including new features.  We are now in SAP BI 4.3 territory!

This update is about keeping the BI 4.2 lights on a bit longer by fixing bugs and adding few extra things to the PAM.

• More from SAP:

What's New

• LinkedIn Community:

Webi4Me

Download Location

These packages are available from Software Downloads

Also see SAP Note 2896442



In my case, that's a good old 12.5 GB download!



 

Installing / Upgrading - How did it go?

My test environment is running on an AWS EC2 t2.xlarge.  That's 4 Cores and 16GB RAM.

I have the following installed in SAP BI 4.2 SP07 with 3x Languages: English, French and Finnish.

• Installation: Well it took probably more time as always to unzip everything but all in all (without testing) it took about half day to patch everything.  It well smoothly except for this .NET error but everything I have tested so far works.

• Results:

Documentation

The usual documents have been made available on the SAP Help Portal:

• Released Notes & Fixed Issues

• Release Restrictions (2888901)

• Business Intelligence Platform Administrator Guide

• SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform 4.2 SP08 Installation Guide

Windows

Unix

• Support Package Update Guide

• More Documents

BI Platform (SAP Help Portal)

SAP Analytics (SAP Help Portal)

Product Availability Matrix (PAM)

(Supported Platform)

Release to Customer (RTC): 13.11.2015

General Availability (GA): 08.03.2016

End of Mainstream Maintenance: 31.12.2022

End of Priority One Support Phase: 31.12.2024

• URLs:

SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.2 Supported Platforms (PAM)

Product Availability Matrix | SAP Support Portal

• Important:

Expiry of SAP BI 4.1 (Priority One Maintenance) on 31/12/2020 (PAM)

Expiry of SAP BI 4.2 SP06 in February 2020: BI 4.2 Support Pack End of Life Dates

Additions to the Relational Data Sources:

Amazon	EMR 5.20 Hive (Hive2)	2.3.4
Amazon	EMR 5.20 Hive (Hive2)	2.3.4
HP	Vertica	9.2
HP	Vertica	9.2
Microsoft	Excel *	2019
Microsoft	Access *	2019
Microsoft	SQL Server	2017
Oracle	Oracle Database	19c
Oracle	Oracle Database	19c
Oracle	Oracle Database	19c
Oracle	Oracle Exadata Database Machine *	19c
Oracle	Oracle Exadata Database Machine *	19c
Pivotal	Greenplum*	6.0
Pivotal	Greenplum*	6.0
PostgreSQL	PostgreSQL	11
PostgreSQL	PostgreSQL	11
SAP	NW BW *	7.5 SP15
SAP	NW BW *	7.5 SP15
Snowflake	Snowflake	N/A
Snowflake	Snowflake	N/A

Maintenance Schedule - What's Next?

• SAP BI 4.2 SP07:

11.03.2020: SAP BI 4.2 SP07 Patch 9 (14.2.7.3437)

24.04.2020: SAP BI 4.2 SP07 Patch 10 (14.2.7.3487)

06.06.2020: SAP BI 4.2 SP07 Patch 11 (14.2.7.3536)

07.08.2020: SAP BI 4.2 SP07 Patch 12 (14.2.7.3592)

26.09.2020: SAP BI 4.2 SP07 Patch 13 (14.2.7.3644) (last one)

• SAP BI 4.2 SP08:

10.04.2020: SAP BI 4.2 SP08 Patch 1 (14.2.8.3481)

08.05.2020: SAP BI 4.2 SP08 Patch 2 (14.2.8.3503)

26.06.2020: SAP BI 4.2 SP08 Patch 3 (14.2.8.3550)

07.08.2020: SAP BI 4.2 SP08 Patch 4 (14.2.8.3594)

23.09.2020: SAP BI 4.2 SP08 Patch 5 (14.2.8.3642)

28.10.2020: SAP BI 4.2 SP08 Patch 6 (14.2.8.3671)

04.12.2020: SAP BI 4.2 SP08 Patch 7 (14.2.8.3708)

27.01.2021: SAP BI 4.2 SP08 Patch 8 (14.2.8.3759)

12.03.2021: SAP BI 4.2 SP08 Patch 9 (14.2.8.3802)

Week 18 (May): SAP BI 4.2 SP08 Patch 10

Week 26 (July): SAP BI 4.2 SP08 Patch 11

Week 35 (Sept): SAP BI 4.2 SP08 Patch 12

• SAP BI 4.2 SP09 (01.03.2021: 14.2.9.3791)

Source: Maintenance Schedule

What's Next... Next!?

Since it was announced at #SAPPHIRENOW 2018 and in my blog back in June 2018, a lot has happened with SAP BI 4.3.

"Early" BETA has come and gone back in late 2019.

"Standard" BETA is still ongoing and scheduled to close at the end of February 2020.

This is what we know about the roadmap so far:

SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.3:

Q4 2019: SAP BI 4.3 (RTC) - "Early" and "Standard" BETA

Q2 2020: SAP BI 4.3 (GA)

Q4 2020: SAP BI 4.3 SP01

Source: Webi4Me

Source: SAP

Conclusion

As planned, not a significant release.  Just bug fixes and minor updates to the PAM.

Except... It took me couple of weeks to notice that Snowflake is now supported!  I thought we'd have to wait for SAP BI 4.3.  Great #geeky news!

I have written a blog on how to make it work: https://blogs.sap.com/2020/03/12/snowflake-for-sap-businessobjects-4.2-sp08/

Looking forward to SAP BI 4.3 General Availability (GA) hopefully in Q2 2020!

Keep in Touch!

Hope this blog was useful.   Please do share your thoughts and comments.

Feel free to "like" and post it on social media!

Always happy to connect: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pperrier/

Take care... A+

 

[former_member563021]

Hi all,

The mystery is solved. It was a problem with how the disk had been formatted. The allocation unit size was set to 2 Mb instead of using the default value, 4 Kb.
Now it is working as expected, and the installation taking the usual disk space.

 

Kind Regards.

[gabrielamartinez]

Hi Patrick and the rest of the experts/colleagues,

 

Thanks for your guide, but I need understand when is necesary update the Patch Level, I have IPS 4.2 SP8 Patch Level 500 and I need update to Pathc Level 700, but is no clear for me the process, I searchy information but I dont see information, the process for update is the similar for Update to Support Packages? is Necesary Desactivate de Firewall and the Antivirus?, Can you help me for this?

Thanks for your help.

[steve_hearne]

Hi. Just posting this here as it's related to 4.2 install and this blog has been helpful to me in the past 🙂

We migrated all content from 4.1 to a 4.2 install. Yesterday we attempted to cutover to our new 4.2 environment by updating the 4.1 link hosted on an F5 load balancer to remove 4.1 webservers and replacing them with 4.2 web servers. This approach we hoped would allow our users to keep using the same link hosted on the F5 e.g. http://biplatform:8080/BOE/BI and avoid disruption of a new link.

We have SSO implemented and at first this approach appeared to have worked. clicking on http://biplatform:8080/BOE/BI launched and logged into BO and then using help/about in LaunchPad showed 4.2 SP8.

However, on closer inspection the actual files and folders listed in BI LaunchPad were coming from the 4.1 CMS!

Investigation of the cookie stored on the users desktop e.g. steve@biplatform shows that the system name is contained in the cookie. For example;

InfoViewPLATFORMSVC_COOKIE_CMS
%40bi41_system

So the 4.2 web severs are not using the cms name setting located in ./custom/BILaunchpad.properties but are using the value stored in the cookie.

Has anyone ever had to use the same link post migration from 4.1 to 4.2 and worked around this issue somehow.

 

Thanks,

Steve