SAP HANA Deployment Infrastructure

SAP HANA Deployment Infrastructure: An Overview

What Is SAP HANA Deployment Infrastructure?

The SAP HANA Deployment Infrastructure (HDI) is a service layer of the SAP HANA database. It helps create runtime database objects from design-time artifacts.

HDI manages dependencies and executes as a transaction, according to an SAP Press blog published in June, 2021.

HDI services are provided using a separate database process called diserver.

SAP HANA Deployment Infrastructure: An Overview

What Is SAP HANA Deployment Infrastructure?

The SAP HANA Deployment Infrastructure (HDI) is a service layer of the SAP HANA database. It helps create runtime database objects from design-time artifacts.

HDI manages dependencies and executes as a transaction, according to an SAP Press blog published in June, 2021.

HDI services are provided using a separate database process called diserver.

HDI Administration Roles, Personas, and Tasks

HDI administration requires that different roles and personas perform each task. Common HDI roles and their associated tasks include the following:

• Database administrator – this system is required to enable HDI and create an HDI administrator, as well as revoke HDI administrator privileges.
• HDI administrator – this role can configure general HDI parameters, maintain containers and container groups, and manage container group administrator privileges — including creating and dropping containers and container groups, granting and revoking required access privileges, and moving containers between container groups.
• HDI container-group administrator – this role manages a set of containers in its own container group. It can grant and revoke container (and container-group) administrator access privileges, import and export containers (for support purposes), grant and revoke container user access privileges (for support purposes), and maintain containers and container groups. (The APIs of a container group “G” are in the _SYS_DI#G schema.)
• HDI container administrator – Configures and controls access to a container, including granting and revoking container administrator access privileges, configuring libraries and parameters, granting and revoking roles from schemas to users, granting and revoking user access to container schemas, and canceling an asynchronous make operation. (The APIs of a container “C” are in the C#DI schema.)

HDI Containers

The maintenance of HDI containers involves various personas and roles to work together.

HDI containers always come in pairs: a design-time container (DTC) and a corresponding runtime container (RTC).

“The runtime objects are created in an HDI container based on the CDS persistence data model, which not only allows for multiple deployments but also for the deployment of multiple versions of a single application into the same SAP HANA database (which is not possible with the repository),” according to an SAP Press blog.

HDI Security Administration

HDI security administration, which requires a multi-layer approach to security, can be intimidating. A YouTube video published by SAP Developers walks through how to create an HDI administrator, HDI Group administrator, and HDI container administrator. It also explains how to grant access to a container to a regular DB reporting user.