SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 00 What's New: Database Backup an...
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In the upcoming weeks, we will be posting new videos to the SAP HANA Academy to show new features and functionality introduced with SAP HANA 2.0 Support Package Stack (SPS) 00.
The topic of this blog is database backup and recovery.
In the previous blog post about system administration, we have already discussed the new SAP HANA cockpit 2.0. For database backup and recovery, a significant new enhancement has been implemented as we can now use cockpit to recover a SAP HANA database. Previously this was not possible as the HANA cockpit was hosted by the XS engine, which was part of the HANA system. To recover a database, you need to stop it first and this, of course, would also mean it was not possible to use the cockpit. With the cockpit 2.0 running on a separate system, this is no longer an issue.
Multitenant Database Containers
Multitenant database container (MDC) mode will soon be the default mode for SAP HANA systems so restoring a tenant database should be a simple exercise. With SAP HANA 2.0, you can now recover a single container system to a tenant database, just like a regular database recovery. In the previous release, this operation was a bit more complex as it required you to setup system replication first and involved a conversion to an MDC system.
With SAP HANA 2.0, you can now configure the location of the log backup catalog to improve the time required to scan the file system or backup storage area to locate it. On HANA 1.0, the catalog is always stored with the log backups.
The system parameter to configure is in the global.ini file, section [persistence]: basepath_catalogbackup. Default value is still the location of the log backups.
When performing a database recovery using the new recovery app of the SAP HANA cockpit, you will be prompted in step 2 to specify the location of the latest backup catalog as you can see in the screenshot below:
The syntax for the RECOVER DATABASE statement with the new USING CATALOG PATH clause is:
RECOVER DATABASE
UNTIL TIMESTAMP '2016-06-01'
USING CATALOG PATH ('/hana/HHB/backup/catalog')
USING LOG PATH ('/hana/HHB/backup/log')
CHECK ACCESS ALL;
Encryption and Backup and Recovery
SAP HANA 2.0 supports data encryption of the log area in addition to the data volume encryption (DVE) that was introduced with SAP HANA 1.0 SPS 09.
Both enabling and disable log volume encryption, and all key management activities can be done using SQL:
In production systems, the number of log backups generated can be significant which could, for some third-party backup tools, be a challenge to digest. For this reason, the performance of log backups has been improved by enabling HANA to write all the log segments of a service that are ready to be backed up at a particular time to a single log backup file. Simply define the maximum size of the log backup and set the system parameter MAX_LOG_BACKUP_SIZE and BACKINT_RESPONSE_TIMEOUT.
SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems: Release Compatibility
One final point to note is that SAP HANA 2.0 on IBM Power Systems only support the Little Endian (LE) architecture. The good news is that this will allow you to easily backup a database on one platform and restore it to another, that is from Intel to Power and vice versa. The not-so-good news is that for those that are now running HANA 1.0 on Power with Big Endian (BE) they will need to perform some additional steps to move to 2.0, as documented in SAP_HANA_System_Migration_en.pdf attached to 2380257 - SAP HANA Platform 2.0 SPS 00 Release Note
The SAP HANA Academy provides free online video tutorials for the developers, consultants, partners and customers of SAP HANA.
Topics range from practical how-to instructions on administration, data loading and modeling, and integration with other SAP solutions, to more conceptual projects to help build out new solutions using mobile applications or predictive analysis.