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jose_at_sap
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
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We recently introduced a couple of exciting new features in the SAP HANA Cloud administration and monitoring tools designed to enhance and streamline database management operations by leveraging generative artificial intelligence.  First, we have a Gen AI virtual assistant feature, enabling administrators to execute operational tasks through conversational chat, navigate the user interface, and generate SQL statements from text queries.  Second, we have the issue summary generation functionality, helping operators to troubleshoot issues in their SAP HANA Cloud instances by providing insights into potential problems and possible resolutions using a vast collection of available information.

Let’s examine these two new features in detail but note that to utilize the new Gen AI capability, you must enable it in the user settings of SAP HANA Cloud Central.  Here’s how you do that:

Enabling Gen AI in SAP HANA Cloud Central

Note: your SAP BTP user needs the role collection "SAP HANA Cloud Administrator".  If this is not the case, you can find details on how to assign this role collection in Subscribing to the SAP HANA Cloud Administration Tools (Multi-Environment) in the SAP Help Portal.

Launch SAP HANA Cloud Central and open the user menu from the top right.  Click on Settings.

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Select Gen AI settings and familiarize yourself with the restricted period and usage limits.  Your daily usage limit for this functionality is 0.5 Capacity Units per user at no additional cost, until July 2025.  You can also review the different links to get more details on using Gen AI in SAP HANA Cloud, as well as the AI terms and conditions.

Enable the AI-assisted database administration capabilities by clicking on the toggle button.  You must accept the AI terms and conditions to continue.  Once accepted, you’ll see the toggle button’s status change to Enabled, along with the setting history to determine who updated this setting and when that happened.  Click on Save to dismiss the dialog.

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After saving the settings, you will see a new button in the toolbar (looks like a gem) to launch Gen AI.

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Virtual Assistant Functionality

You can ask Gen AI (i.e. virtual assistant) to perform tasks in SAP HANA Cloud Central.  Depending on your question, Gen AI will navigate to the appropriate screen to carry out the operation, navigate to a specific application, generate a summary of alerts, generate a SQL statement from your plain text query, or provide you with more information about a particular feature.

Launch Gen AI by clicking on its button in the toolbar.  The Gen AI dialog appears where you can type your question.

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Notice that you can move the dialog by dragging its title bar and that you can maximize it in case you obtain a lengthy answer from Gen AI.  There are a few popular operations (create instance, show alerts overview, and create migration) readily available to execute via the provided buttons.  You can also recall previous plain text queries by pressing the up or down arrow key in the text box.

Let’s ask Gen AI to create an SAP HANA database.  Type “create an SAP HANA database” and click Send.  When creating such an instance, you have the choice of creating a new SAP HANA database or clone a database:

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Click the button Clone SAP HANA database.  You are taken to the Provisioning Wizard, with the option to clone an SAP HANA database already selected, thus saving you a bit of time.  Click the Cancel button at the bottom right to abort this operation.

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Let’s now ask Gen AI to create SQL queries for us.  We can start with a few basic statements:

  1. Ask Gen AI the following: how do I change a user's password with SQL?
  2. Ask Gen AI: how do I assign a privilege to a user using SQL?
  3. Ask Gen AI: give the SQL to display all audit policies

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The correct SQL statements are generated, and you have the option to copy the statement to the clipboard or open it in the SQL Console.  Keep in mind that if you want to execute the statement in the SQL Console, you’ll need to connect to a running database instance.

Let’s now ask Gen AI something that a little more complex:

  1. Ask Gen AI: give the SQL for all connections for the user DBADMIN that are running

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Again, we see the proper SQL statement with the correct WHERE clause, based on what you asked Gen AI.  Note that there will be cases where the generated SQL is not 100% exact.  However, it should give you a basic idea as to how the statement should look like so that you can change it accordingly.  As the Gen AI feature evolves over time, the accuracy of the generated SQL syntax will improve.

Depending on your SAP HANA Cloud deployment, what you can ask Gen AI to perform can be quite extensive.  Here are some examples:

  • Navigate to a specific application and obtain more information about a particular feature.

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  • Generate a summary of alerts.

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As you can see, using Gen AI can speed up the administration effort by easily guiding you to the appropriate application, based on what you want to do.  It can be handy when new database management features are included in SAP HANA Cloud because Gen AI may inform you about them as you perform a specific task.  Operators who are new to the SQL language can quickly generate statements to assist in the learning of the SQL scripts most relevant to their deployment.  For the more experienced SQL users, Gen AI can produce a SQL statement that can be viewed as a good starting point to be tweaked to accomplish more complex tasks.

Issue Summary Generation Functionality

For specific types of alerts, Gen AI can produce a detailed summary of the issues encountered.  These summaries provide charts, analysis of the situation, and recommended resolution steps.  This feature uses Gen AI to reference the relevant information from a huge source of documentation, including the product’s user assistance, SAP Notes, and knowledge-based articles (KBAs), based on the statistical data available for your SAP HANA Cloud instance.  If that statistical data is not available, Gen AI will simply offer general information on the issue at hand with steps on how to resolve it.

In the initial release of the SAP HANA Cloud, AI-assisted database administration, you can generate issue summaries for out of memory situations, blocked transactions, or delta merge issues.  Let’s look at one example.

As a prerequisite, I produced a blocked transaction condition that raised an error alert:

2025-01-21_19-47-58 Alerts Blocked Tx Error.jpg

Now I asked Gen AI about the alerts and selected to obtain an overview:

2025-01-21_19-48-39 Gen AI Alerts Summary Blocked Tx Error.jpg

Below the chart is the list of alerts and you can click the three-dot menu beside a specific alert to invoke a context menu.  I selected Troubleshoot Alert for the long-running blocking situation alert.

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The issue summary generation details appear:

2025-01-21_19-50-10 Gen AI Recommendation Blocked Tx Error.jpg

At this point, I’m presented with options to resolve my issue.  The analysis and chart point to an isolated incident, based on the trend for this type of issue.  I’m given the transaction IDs and I can use them in the performance management tools in SAP HANA Cloud Central, such as the User Transaction or SQL Statements applications.  Gen AI offers me a way to navigate to those applications.  Several recommendations are also displayed for me to consider, based on the large set of product documentation, SAP Notes, and KBAs available.  The net result of this feature is that it reduces the time and effort spent troubleshooting this type of issues.  For more information about this feature, please refer to Monitoring SAP HANA Cloud Instances Using Gen AI in the SAP Help Portal.

Limitations and Usage Terms

Finally, it’s important to cover the usage limits and terms.  You may have noticed that the Gen AI dialog mentions Joule.  This version of SAP HANA Cloud, AI-assisted database administration uses Joule with limited features in SAP HANA Cloud Central, a reduced set of capabilities tailored for use within the SAP HANA Cloud environment.  For more information about the scope of this technology, please refer to Using Gen AI in SAP HANA Cloud Central in the SAP Help Portal.

SAP HANA Cloud, AI-assisted database administration is only available in SAP BTP data center deployments where the SAP AI Core service is available.  For more information, please see SAP Note 3491182 - Production Center Deployments and Resource Plan Availability and SAP Note 3437766 - Availability of Generative AI Models.

When it comes to using Gen AI, you can use it at no additional cost until July 2025, with a daily limit of 0.5 Capacity Units (CU) per user.  After July 2025, or if you reach the daily limit, you’ll need to subscribe to the commercial version.

For now, I hope you enjoy and take advantage of the new generative AI capabilities in SAP HANA Cloud Central.  Feel free to leave a comment about your experience!