14.4    Additional Options in SAP HANA Application Lifecycle Management

In addition to the management of delivery units and the transportation of delivery units between systems, SAP HANA application lifecycle management offers a few other features that might benefit the lifecycle management of security-related artifacts. SAP HANA application lifecycle management provides the ability to use a change recording mechanism and also supports the Change and Transport System (CTS). Let’s take a closer look at each of these options.

14.4.1    Change Recording

Change recording is an option you can enable in the SAP HANA repository. When enabled, the initial activation of a development artifact will need to be assigned to a change list or change ID until the change list is released. The purpose of the change list is to track changes within a development artifact. Recall that artifacts are assigned to a package and that packages are assigned to a delivery unit. When change recording is enabled, delivery unit changes aren’t available for transport until they’re confirmed and released within the change management interface of SAP HANA application lifecycle management. Thus, you can’t transport a change until its individual revision is confirmed and the change list is released using the change management area of SAP HANA application lifecycle management.

When change recording is enabled, your organization will have a middle layer within the transport process. This middle layer requires that all changes be approved before they’re transported or even exported to a delivery unit file. Without change tracking, a delivery unit would be composed of the most recent changes each time the transport process executes or each time a delivery unit file exports from SAP HANA Studio. All objects within the delivery unit and package would need to be transported even if they weren’t ready. Change tracking allows the transport manager to reassign changes to different change lists. For example, let’s assume that a delivery unit contains five development artifacts. One of the five artifacts must be promoted to QA as soon as possible. However, the remaining four artifacts haven’t been validated. The transport manager can reassign the one artifact needed in QA to a new change list and then approve and release the change list for transport, thus allowing the transport manager to transport individual development artifacts within a package and delivery unit if needed.

14.4.2    Using the Change and Transport System

The Change and Transport System (CTS) is a utility that organizations often use to manage the lifecycle of a traditional SAP NetWeaver Application Server (SAP NetWeaver AS). CTS facilitates the promotion of development projects in the ABAP Workbench. Although independent applications, SAP HANA application lifecycle management offers integration with the CTS. When this integration is enabled, your organization can use the tools and processes available from the CTS to manage the promotion of native SAP HANA development artifacts between SAP HANA instances.