Release Notes for SAP HANA Cloud Platform

Release of SAP HANA Cloud connector 2.8.0

• There is a performance monitor that allows you to check the performance of all or individual requests. The time used by a request is shown by logical groups.
• The connection monitor allows administrators to see active and idle connections currently existing for the exposed systems.
• Hardware metrics allow you to understand the operating system status for the host, the SAP HANA Cloud connector is running on. The CPU consumption, disc usage and memory consumption are shown in comprehensive diagrams.
• Alerts can be sent to a list of configured email recipients. Thus, administrators get informed about potential issues for (their SAP HANA Cloud connector installation.
• It is now also possible to expose RFC systems to SAP HANA Cloud Platform. They are only visible to the Cloud Connector when being accessed via saprouter.

The extension account is now automatically assigned to the corresponding SAP HANA Cloud Platform global account during the automated configuration of SAP HANA Cloud Platform extension package for SAP SuccessFactors. To initiate the automated configuration, SAP SuccessFactors administrators require an integration token created in the SAP HANA Cloud Platform cockpit. The integration token determines the SAP HANA Cloud Platform users who will be initially authorized to deploy and administer the extension applications. The token also determines the SAP HANA Cloud Platform landscape and the global account from which the respective resources will be consumed.

Automatic creation of players on event. The handleEvent method accepts the optional parameter playerName within the EventObject. When a player is created, the playerNameparameter will be used if provided.

The new attributes endpoint of the User API returns the principal attributes of the current user, which have been obtained from the SAML assertion.

Fixes in 2.8.0

• When using HTTP connection pooling for Principal Propagation, users can connect to on-premise systems successfully if there is some special character in their user attributes.
• Fixed denied access situations when accessing the on-premise system in Principal Propagation scenarios because the configured Expiration Tolerance value was ignored after a shadow became a master.

Pagination:

• Several new parameters allow you to paginate lists. For more information, see API documentation.
• The Gamification Workbench Terminal supports paginated API access.

Easier SDK management from within the console client:

• New command sdk-upgrade. Use the command to upgrade your SDK on Windows, Linux and OSX operation systems. For more information, see sdk-upgrade.
• Auto-checking of SDK version. When you execute a command in the console client, you get a warning message if the SDK you use is obsolete or deprecated and receive a suggestion to upgrade to a particular version.

Account management moved to global account level, where it belongs.

• Accounts. The Overview page of a global account lists all accounts in the current data center. Flip an account tile to see its full details or use the pen icon to change account details. New accounts are also created from there now.For more information, see Defining Account Details.
• Quotas. The quotas for Java compute units moved to a table in separate page under the global account. From the menu on the left select Quota Management. For more information, see Managing Account Quota.

Trial database schema retirement. As of 19 May 2016, on the Trial landscape, SAP HANA multi-tenant database containers (MDCs) replace SAP HANA database schemas.

• For information on archiving and preserving the content of your SAP HANA database schemas, see the SCN article Archiving Trial HANA instance running on SAP HANA Cloud Platform.
• For information on using SAP HANA on the Trial landscape, see Using a Trial SAP HANA Instance.

SAP Web IDE is now a service and will be removed from the list of HTML5 subscriptions. To open SAP Web IDE, please navigate to Services and open it from there.

• Entity Update: all mechanics, teams, players and apps can now be updated. Note that names and playerId can not be changed after creation (use displayName instead). Existing methods that allowed changing names (playerId) are deprecated as they may lead to inconsistencies in the rule engine.
• Entity Duplication: all mechanics and teams can now be duplicated, for example a new entity with the same attribute values as the original entity is created.
• Auto-create players on events: apps can now be configured to create players automatically when an event occurs.

SAP HANA Database revision 112 (SPS 11) is now productively available. For more information, see SAP Note 2021789 - SAP HANA Revision and Maintenance Strategy.

The delivery of SAP HANA Database SP11 does not support the following main features newly introduced with SAP HANA SP11:

• SAP HANA extended application services, advanced model (XS advanced)
• SAP HANA Hadoop Integration
  

• The Gamification Workbench is fully reworked to offer better usability and to reflect the new update and clone features offered through the API.For more information, see Configuring Game Mechanics.
• Auto-initiate players for apps: the very first event for a player within an app now triggers the initPlayerForApp event that can be used to initialize players for apps. Sending an explicit initialization event for players of a certain app is not mandatory anymore.For more information, see Integrating Player (User) Management.

SAP JVM 8 is generally available for productive use as a deployment option for the Java Web Tomcat 7 runtime. For more information, see Choosing JRE Version.

Faster log viewer for Java applications. The speed of the viewer has increased 9 times for 15 MB files. It is even higher for larger files and repeat executions.

SAP HANA revision 102.05 is supported. For more information see SAP Note 2021789 - SAP HANA Revision and Maintenance Strategy.

SAP HANA Interactive Education (SHINE) can be installed as an SAP HANA component via the cockpit. This application is for demo purposes only and is used as a self-service. For more information, see SAP HANA Interactive Education (SHINE) and SAP Note 1934114.

SAPUI5 distribution 1.28.31 is supported. For more information, see What's New in SAPUI5 or Change Log.

SAP ASE 16 SP2 is supported. For more information, see What’s new in SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise 16.0 SP02.

Restarting a whole SAP HANA database system is now possible using the SAP HANA Cloud Platform cockpit. Previously, it was possible only by using the console client command restart-hana.

For more information, see Managing Databases.

SAP HANA Cloud connector 2.7.2 is released.

• Performance improvement for high-latency communication with small data amounts when using RFC via JCo on the SAP HANA Cloud Platform side.
• Support for Java 8.
• Support for Windows 10.

Fixes in 2.7.2

• Error message for logon failure for an RFC system was swallowed when connecting via message server.
• Pooling of HTTP connections works with Principal Propagation.
• Eliminated ConcurrentModificationException occurring when closing a connection to a backend. The exception could lead to delayed release of sockets on operating system level.
• UI certificate chain import works when the CA response provides the chain in reverse order.
• Improved robustness when loading corrupt configurations.
• In high availability setups, when the failover instance (shadow) is down, it is still possible to add an account or import host mappings. 
• Redirects to servers not known to the Cloud Connector do not lead to Access Denied responses when the SAP HANA Cloud Platform application wants to take care of the redirect itself.

New runtime for Java releases with important security improvements is available.

We recommend that you update your runtime for Java by following the procedure in Updating Applications with Zero Downtime.

There is a new section FAQ with a collection of frequently asked questions and provided solutions. For more details, see FAQ.

The Push, OData and Processing APIs of MMS are also used with OAuth. The OData interface supports batch processing as defined in the OData V2 specification. For more information, refer to sections Push Service API Authentication, Message Consumption and Message Processing.

A new --updates parameter allows the version command to check whether the SDK version is still supported and to suggest updates and hot fixes. For more information, see Version.

The selection of tables in the app data UI in the MMS cockpit has been simplified.

The Members list shows the names of members in addition to their user IDs. The name of a member becomes available after the first time the member visits the account.

Administrators can send emails to account members.

JCo runtime for SAP HANA Cloud Platform:

• Fixed connection pool recovery problems when property jco.destination.max_get_client_time not set to 0.
• Improved tracing for metadata and data content.
• Added clone() method to the JCoFunction interface.

The API offers two new methods:

• adjustPointsForPlayer for adjusting player points as TenantOperator,
• withdrawPointsFromPlayer "rule only” for withdrawing points.

The new GamificationReviewer role provides read-access to game mechanics.

Multiple SAP HANA databases can be hosted on a single SAP HANA system when the support for multitenant database container (MDC) is enabled for the SAP HANA databases (beta). Creating a tenant database is available on the trial landscape too.

A tenant database runs for 12 hours and shuts down at the end of the period to free resources. A tenant database that is not used for 30 days is automatically deleted.

A blog post describes the procedure for creating and testing a tenant database by using the SAP HANA Interactive Education example on a trial landscape. For more information, see SAP HANA Multitenant Database Containers (MDC) Scenarios Now on Trial Landscape.

In addition, the OData entity properties are typed according to the respective database table column. For RDMS, a device supports up to 32 custom attributes. For example, you can use a custom attribute to store things like serial number, MAC or IP address of a device. For more information, see Device.

Fixes:

• When a shadow is upgraded from an older version, the system certificate stays correctly available. The system certificate used to get lost during the upgrade when connecting to the master instance, which was not yet upgraded. As a result, the system certificate could be restored only with a workaround.
• The restart mechanism works properly in all environments. On some Linux systems, the restart used to not work as expected.
• Changes needed to support the correct E2E destination check.