SAP HANA Design Studio vs. Eclipse with HANA tools - the differences?!

[Former Member]

Hay everybody,

I´m dealing not so long with BW powered by HANA.

During my learning process I often asked myself what is the difference between SAP HANA Design Studio and Eclipse whith HANA tools?

I know that you can download and install SAP HANA Studio from SAP, install ABAP development tools and start with the administration and development on HANA as well as the administration and configuration for BW powered by HANA.

And (afaik) you have the same options with Eclipse with HANA tools.

So the only difference I noticed between these tools is the installation process. The features of these tools are more or less the same, aren´t they?

And at that point, I´m just a little bit confused. What are the differences between these tools? Are they particulary designed for different purposes?

Well, I hope (and I´m sure) you can help me to understand the difference between SAP HANA Design Studio and Eclipse with HANA tools.

Thank you very much in advance for your answers!

EDIT:

I just found this in the SAP BW Modeling Tools Installation Guide in chapter 3.1.2.1 Use Cases (page 13):

Which Eclipse installation is suitable depends among other things on the use cases that you implement the Eclipse platform or Eclipse IDE for. For usage in combination with the BW Modeling Tools, you have the following two options:

● ABAP development on SAP HANA: For this use case, you need to have SAP HANA Studio 2.0 (revision 90 or higher) installed on your local drive. This is the recommended approache. It will be described in detail in the following steps.

● Side-by-side Java and ABAP development: For this use case, you usually need to have an Eclipse edition running as your development environment. You can add ABAP Development Tools to your existing Eclipse installation. Due to the dependency of the BW Modeling Tools on SAP HANA Studio components, you need to use the SAP Update site for Luna for this scenario: https://tools.hana.ondemand.com/luna/

[former_member216578 · Accepted solution]

Hi, Torge.

There's no difference between Eclipse IDE and HANA Studio, it's just relabeling and some visual changes. You can install the same features into the Eclipse or HANA Studio as well.

This question was asked here (openSAP discussions), please, check the 6th answer. The text is: "But the two are identical other than a few cosmetic items like the launch icon, title bar, and about dialog." by Thomas Jung (SAP HANA PM).

But I've faced some issues with Eclipse Mars (a lot of perspectives failed to open), Luna works fine.

Regards,

Andrew.

[dmitry_kuznetsov1 · Accepted solution]

Hey Andrey, did you manage to install BW Modelling tools for 7.4 on HANA Studio directly?

[former_member216578 · Accepted solution]

Hi, Dmitry.

I don't remember any issues with installation of any HANA-related tools on HANA Studio (shipped by SAP), but it was about a year ago. At that point of time there was some "synchronization" between tools version and Studio version: it was the last Studio version. After some time I've tried to update tools, but it failed: some tools have changed or migrated to another, some have outdated, so they were no longer valid. With changes in Java (switch from 7 to 😎 my Studio version became completely non-runnable (a lot of exceptions in different situations), so I've decided to reinstall all HANA tools into fresh Eclipse Luna, and all worked fine.

I often face some issues with update because of tool changes, but fresh installation (or remove then install) of any tool works fine. Your problem may be concerned with outdated base Eclipse version of HANA Studio.

Regards,

Andrey.

[dmitry_kuznetsov1]

Hi Torge,

HANA Studio is, in principle, for HANA-only modelling. I did not manage to install BW / ABAP modelling tools for 7.4 on top of existing HANA Studio installation (= a couple of days burnt). Eclipse with HANA Studio, BW and ABAP tools makes much a better sense.

So, my approach is:

• Remove any HANA studio you currently have, restart, etc.
• Install Eclipse Luna
• Install the modelling tools (HANA, BW or ABAP) for it

*this is based on my personal example, some people might find it working good in other combinations

Dmitry