Time to upgrade your HANA system if...

[jgleichmann]

often people ask me: "when is the right time to update/upgrade the HANA system?". Normally if your system works fine and it meets the business requirements there is no need besides:

1. Support


2. Known functional bugs (e.g. wrong result or index server crash)


3. Significant performance improvements


4. Bugs which have influence to the consistency of the data


5. Dependencies to the application / operating system

---

1) Support

End of support for SPS11 was in November 2016. So all new fixes for HANA 1.0 will get released in SPS12. Now not only till SPS13, because there will no SPS13. SPS12 has support from May 2016 till May  2019  2021, because it is the last release of HANA platform 1.0



 

Details:

HANA Revision strategy

2021789 - SAP HANA 1.0 Revision and Maintenance Strategy

2378962 - SAP HANA 2.0 Revision and Maintenance Strategy

1948334 - SAP HANA Database Update Paths for SAP HANA Maintenance Revisions

2115815 - FAQ: SAP HANA Database Patches and Upgrades

 

 

---

2) and 4) Known Bugs

Another reason for upgrading to latest release of SPS12 (currently: 122.16 05/2018) are the known bugs which are also connected with some issues regarding the consistency:

Product	Description	Note	affected prior	affected in SPS12
All	Garbage Collection Fails for LOB Files of Row Store Tables	2351467	<= 112.05	<= 122.01
All	Possible unique constraint violation when using non-ASCII Characters	2338166	<= 112.03	<= 121
All	Insert of UTF-8 non-ASCII Characters Can Cause Wrong Dictionary Ordering	2339989	<= 112.03	<= 121
BW	Possible Data Corruption after Activating Data in advanced DataStore Objects	2385658	>= 110	<= 122.03
All	Possible Column Store Table Corruption	2375691	>= 110	<= 122.02
All	Possible Rowstore Table Corruption When Continuous Page Flush is Enabled	2370160	-	<=122.03
All	Join Engine Query Returns Unexpected Results in Aggregation of Large Intermediate Result Sets in 122.04	2403088	-	=122.04
All	Potential data loss during HANA upgrade with unsuccessful Delta merge	2344374	< 112.04	<= 121
All	Switching from operation mode logreplay to delta datashipping can cause corrupted data	2434600	<=112.07	<=122.11
All	Indexserver Crash at ptime::Futex::lock While Checking a Corrupt Rowstore Table for Consistency	2434657	<=112.07	<=122.06
All	Found new log hole, Log ends at 0x###, cannot recover until 0x### (inexact)	2434278	-	<=122.05
All	Inconsistency After Repartitioning a Table Using Inverted Hash Indexes	2436619	<=112.07	<=122.99
All	Indexserver Crash at UnifiedTable::FragmentObject::getMaxRowID While Checking a Corrupt Partitioned Columnstore Table for Consistency	2443040	<=112.07	<=122.08
All	Indexserver Crash at TransactionManager::PersistenceSessionContainer at Caller Metadata::GrantedPrivInfo::deleteGrantedPrivInfo due to Orphaned Roles	2477085	-	<=122.09
All	Potential Inconsistencies on Column Store Tables with Async Fulltext Index After Table Rename Operation	2573918	-	<=122.15
All	Out of Memory Situations During Table Load can Cause NULL Values in Column Store Tables on Revision 122.15	2614670	-	=122.15
All	Indexserver Crash at ptime::PageLocker::unlock With "Assertion failed: isLocked" After Upgrading to SAP HANA database Revisions 122.15 or 012.04	2611939	-	=122.15
All	Column Store Table Cannot be Loaded After Indexserver Restart	2640933	-	<=122.10

Recommendation: Please check carefully if your system is affected by the bugs in 2375691 or 2370160! For details how to check them just the follow the instructions in the notes. If you hit one of this bugs, you have to restore your system to correct the affected tables!!!

---

3) Significant performance improvements

Just check the corresponding "known issues" note for your release for improvements:
2325090 – SAP HANA DB: Known issues detected in SPS12
2265103 - SAP HANA DB: Known issues detected in SPS11
2000002 - FAQ: SAP HANA SQL Optimization

---

5) Dependencies to the application / operating system

Since S/4HANA 1709 you have to use HANA 2 >= SPS01 and also if you use one of the latest OS releases (2235581) you have to use one of the latest revisions.

For SLES12 SP3 you need >=122.15

For RHEL 7.4 you need >=122.14





 



 



 

---

So if you are currently running with 122.05 you are pretty save, but as you know from the past - every revision has its own "features" which you can see from the table of known bugs. [Edit] You should update to >=122.16 to avoid inconsistencies in connection with special scenarios and use of features described in the notes above.

But another parameter which comes with 122.02 is unload_upper_bound which "reduces" the memory usage (details in note 2301382 - High "Used memory" in Pool/PersistenceManager/PersistentSpace/DefaultLPA/Page after upgrade to HANA SPS11 or a higher SPS). The heap memory usage with virtual file pages will be covered in the next blog. If you are interested just follow me 😉

Regards,
Jens

############
Update 1.1
############
HANA memory usage details and changes in SPS12
HANA memory usage details: Part 1 Shared Memory
HANA memory usage details: Part 2 Heap Memory

############
Update 1.2
############
2403088 - Join Engine Query Returns Unexpected Results in Aggregation of Large Intermediate Result S...


############
Update 1.3
############
Added 3)
HANA details part 3 tech. changes in sps12

 

############
Update 1.4
############

Added new support for HANA 1.0 ,new Known Bugs and dependencies to the application / OS