It's been 4 weeks since I last published a blog, and I wanted to assure you I have not been slacking off.
Although, understandably summer is here and typically things slow down a bit for some of us. Not so in my case, I took it upon myself as a challenge to finally get SAP HANA Certified after working on HANA for about 3 years. I don't remember the last time I got SAP certified, gosh! It must have been the SAP Technical Consultant Certification - Netweaver 2004s (well the title gave some clues), by that time I think I was feeling burnt out from all the SAP certifications I took back then. Admittedly, I really didn't know where to get started again. Things have changed so much with SAP since the R/2 and R/3 days. Nowadays, I learn new things by doing, not by taking classes or reading endless materials available online. What if I fail? Crazy thoughts went through my mind. Silly thoughts really, after working with HANA in some capacity every day, but it could happen - never underestimate it. "Respect the process!", I told myself. I decided I was going to get serious and put in the work, and since I was going to put in the work, why stop at a single certification, let's get a few since they are somewhat related. That's it, I'm going for 3. Finally, I got both nervous and excited about the learning process again, and what I can share through future publications.
Stop here if you're looking for exam questions! Samples are provided with the certification documents, and I'm sure there are tons of places out there if you search for them. I'm just going to summarize some thoughts from my experiences and a general guideline including the efforts and resources it will likely take.
The Exams
After some research at https://training.sap.com I decided to take the following 3 certifications in the technical path in order to cover as much breadth as possible on technology, installation, and support. The following exams were taken within a 10 days period:
- SAP Certified Technology Associate – SAP HANA (Edition 2015) - Cost $500 USD
- SAP Certified Technology Specialist – SAP HANA Installation (Edition 2015) - Cost $234 USD
- SAP Certified Support Associate – SAP HANA (Edition 2014) - Cost $234 USD - RETIRED June/2016 (I guess I just wanted a collector's item :)
The Resources
- Exam Fees: ~ $1000 USD
- Training Courses: I didn't take any, I'll explain further below in The Preparation section
- Materials: ~ $100 USD books
- Systems: See Hands-on experience in the Preparation section below
The Preparation
- Training
- I didn't take any courses because I felt I've had enough experience and really didn't have the time. It was going to take enough time out of my schedule and I didn't want to pay for courses that I probably can learn from other methods below. However, SAP recommends the following available in-class or e-learning:
- HA100: SAP HANA Introduction
- HA200: SAP HANA Installation & Operations
- HA240: Authorization, Security and Scenarios
- HA250: Migration to SAP HANA using DMO
- TADM55: SAP NetWeaver AS DB Operation (SAP HANA) - This course would probably be sufficient to cover all the above, though it's expensive and thus not regularly scheduled
- I didn't take any courses because I felt I've had enough experience and really didn't have the time. It was going to take enough time out of my schedule and I didn't want to pay for courses that I probably can learn from other methods below. However, SAP recommends the following available in-class or e-learning:
- Hands-on experience
- SAP on AWS: There are many HANA scenarios and versions you can spin up from SAP Cloud Appliance Library, but you will need your own cloud account at either AWS or Azure, and there are related cloud usage costs associated. Depending on the scenarios you choose and the cloud region, this could range from about $1 - $4 USD per hour of usage. You can shut it down when you use it. If you need help with running SAP on AWS, let us know.
- Actual project or lab experience: In my case, these provided most of the hands-on needs.
- Documentation
- This was where most of my time was consumed:
- Books: A colleague lend me his copy of https://www.sap-press.com/sap-hana-administration_3506/
- Sample questions
- Each exam had some sample questions and answer keys
- Time effort
- Actual exam: 3 hours (C_HANATEC151) + 3 hours (C_HANASUP_1) + 1.5 hours (E_HANAINS151)
- Preparation time: 60 hours (C_HANATEC151) + 24 hours (C_HANASUP_1) + 16 hours (E_HANAINS151)
- Topics
- System Architecture
- Scale-Out Scenarios: including use-cases
- Hardware and Operating System
- System Landscape Planning: including Transport management - CTS+, HTC (HANA Transport Container), HALM (HANA Application Lifecycle Manager)
- High Availability and Disaster Tolerance
- Installation, Uninstall Procedures, Upgrade
- Post-Installation
- Data Provisioning
- Backup and Recovery
- Database Migration to SAP HANA
- SAP HANA Monitoring: HANA Cockpit, SAP DBACOCKPIT, SAP Solution Manager
- Security and Authorization: Users, Privileges, Roles, Audit
- Operation of SAP HANA
- Administration Tools: HANA Studio, HDBCLM/HDBCLMGUI, HLM (HANA Lifecycle Manager)
- Configurations
- Troubleshooting: System Reports, Trace
- Performance: Data Model, Trace
Nuggets of Wisdom
- If you have never taken an SAP certification exam, you will first need to register on the SAP training site. The process is very convoluted. I already had an S-User from all my certifications years ago, but apparently, I don't have the email associated with it anymore so it took SAP some time to update my online access. Even so, it proved difficult to re-use it with the new (at least for me) SAP training website. It took about a week to get SAP to sort it out and issue me a new S-User. You need this S-User to associate it with the Pearson VUE SAP testing website.
- You cannot just log on to Pearson to schedule and pay for your exam, you first need to purchase the exam voucher from SAP and wait (up to 3 business days) for the voucher code specifically for the exam you wish to take. Don't get the exam code wrong or you won't be able to schedule your exam, and give yourself a few days to plan the whole pay, wait for the code, and schedule the exam based on the facility's availability.
- HANA is very complex, don't let any marketing tell you otherwise. Just look at the list of topics above, there are normally technical manuals for every one of them, collectively thousands of pages worth. I'm sure I've said it before: it may be simple for end-users, but certainly not for IT teams. It is an entire platform.
- Depending on which SAP HANA Edition exams you choose, you may not have access to older SAP documentation, so while you can use the latest HANA SPS docs, be wary that some features/options may not be applicable or available in the version of your exam. This should help if you take the learning classes for the versions of the exams you take. Remember, each year SAP will release 2 Support Pack Stacks (SPS), so things change fast!
- Don't get bogged down with any single topic, move on and you will likely encounter other areas which help make sense of that one topic you struggled with. Many people have lots of knowledge and experience in a few areas but may struggle with the breadth of these HANA certification topics.
- The average score needed to pass these exams are less than 60%, but don't be fooled by what seems to be a low bar. About a third of the exam questions are tricky, whether intentional or not. Some require you to have an almost photographic memory of what the tool's screens, tabs, and/or options looked like. Some other questions are just plain ambiguous or their answers are presented ambiguously.
- One possibly can pass all these certification exams and still may not be able to do a good job managing HANA, after all, HANA is complex (see item 3). So far, SAP has not released any technical HANA Professional level certifications, but ideally, those would really test experiences.
- Unless you have a date/time restriction, take your time to prepare well, not everyone will start with similar background and experience so assume you need to understand most topics and remember at least 60% of what you learned. But don't take too long or the material and versions may be obsolete (see item 4).
- Learning never stops no matter how much experience one has, and changes are fast in today's technology landscape - so learn a little every day and test what you learn to help understand and remember it. You never know when you're going to need it and in today's age, we rely too much on online searches without truly understanding what we see.
- Share what you learn: I've heard this saying somewhere "If you want to be a Student - Learn, but if you want to be a Master - Teach!"