SAP HANA Cloud Database Upgrades and Patches - Part 1

[yogananda]

In this blog, will provide you more information about SAP HANA Cloud Upgrade and Patches processes for customers, partners and every individual database adminstrators to initiate by our own maintenance window.

Upgrades and patches for the SAP HANA database are continuously provided.

Patches

Patches are provided for every version of the SAP HANA database for up to seven months after its initial release. Apply a patch to fix known bugs and benefit from other improvements.

By default, applying a patch requires the instance to be restarted, which causes downtime. To reduce the downtime, an upgrade can be performed without the need to restart the instance. You can choose whether the instance is restarted or not in the instance configuration under Advanced Settings  Upgrade Mode.

Upgrades

If a new version of the SAP HANA database is available, then a notification appears in SAP HANA Cloud Central.

A new version of SAP HANA Cloud is released every three months. The version is referred to by QRC (quarterly release cycle), the quarter and the year in which it was released, for example QRC 1/2021. In between QRC releases, patches that contain bug fixes and other improvements are made available.You cannot downgrade to a lower version or revert to the previous version after the upgrade was performed.

The currently installed version of the SAP HANA database and its version history are available on the instance configuration page under Version.

Caution

Every version of SAP HANA Cloud, SAP HANA database is provided with patches for up to seven months. Afterwards, SAP automatically upgrades an instance to the next higher version. Automatic upgrades are performed in a maintenance window that you will be notified of in advance. The maintenance window for the automatic upgrade of an instance is defined by SAP. If you perform a manual upgrade, you can upgrade to the latest revision of any available QRC release.

Upgrade Timeline of SAP HANA Cloud QRC Revisions

Upgrade Mode

By default, an upgrade to a newer version of the SAP HANA database requires the instance to be restarted, which causes downtime. To reduce the downtime, an upgrade can be performed without the need to restart the instance. If you change the upgrade mode from Upgrade with restart to Upgrade without restart, a replica of database instance is created. When initiating an upgrade, the replica is upgraded first and becomes the active instance once the upgrade is complete.

To change the Upgrade Mode, navigate to the Advanced Settings in the instance configuration and will be continued in next blog - Part 2

[SabinLarranagaI]

This information doesn´t apply for the SAP HANA Cloud, Data Lake component, It only covers the release strategy for SAP HANA Cloud, SAP HANA Database.

Here you can find more information about release strategy for SAP HANA Cloud, Data Lake

[yogananda]

Thank you for reading my entire blog sabin.larranaga

I have covered only for SAP HANA Cloud and SAP HANA Database.     I hope someone will write the blog for SAP HANA Cloud, Data Lake as per your link and also explain for Part 2 with detailed steps.

[SabinLarranagaI]

Hi Yogananda,

Thank you for putting together this series of blog posts.

Perhaps you can edit this post as it suggest that covers the upgrade & patches for SAP HANA Cloud but it only does it for one of its components.

Sabin

[yogananda]

Thank you sabin.larranaga

I have tagged now SAP HANA Cloud

[sagarsv]

Hello,

I have stuck in a strange situation, let me explain I hope if some of you have answer

On October 9th (today) : Morning I have updated our development instance to latest version of HANA cloud which is 2023.28.7(QRC 3/2023)

On same day(October 9th (today)) we planned to upgrade our pre-prod instance as well in the afternoon , now version 023.28.7(QRC 3/2023) is no more available but a new version is available 2023.28.8(QRC 3/2023)

 

This is very confusing for me on how to plan upgrades to be in sync , that I have took downtime for development instance upgrade with business , now I am stuck with 2023.28.7(QRC 3/2023) in DEV and no similar version available for pre-prod 😞

 

I also checked using BTP CLI to find if version is available using following command: but no luck 2023.28.7(QRC 3/2023)  is not available
"btp get services/instance --name <instance name> --subaccount <subaccount ID> --show-parameters "

 

I posted the same question here : https://answers.sap.com/questions/13981892/hana-cloud-version-missing-to-upgrade-and-maintain.html

regards

sagar