Scenario: You have a small test system or PoC system and you want to revert or recreate the HANA DB like you’ve just opened the box and installed it from new, but without the hassle of the reinstall.
This is completely possible using the hdbnsutil command line program.
With HANA shutdown, connect to the HANA server via SSH as the <sid>adm Linux user, then run the hdbnsutil command line program as follows:
hana01:/usr/sap/H10/HDB10/exe>
hdbnsutil -initTopology
checking for inactive nameserver …
nameserver hana01:31001 not responding.
creating persistence …
run as transaction master writing initial topology…
writing initial license: status check = 2
done
As you will see, it recreates the persistence layer (database) and also re-creates the license.
You will need to reinstall your HANA system license after the re-initialisation process is complete.
On a slow system, the process took approximately 2 minutes.
Due to the size of my system, I am unable to tell you if this process destroys any specific configuration. From what I can tell, the existing global.ini, nameserver.ini and indexserver.ini are kept.
You should also note that the SYSTEM user password is reset to its default value of “master”.
Plus, if you have enabled encryption, the reinitialised data volumes will be re-encrypted unless you de-check the checkbox on the Data Volume Encryption tab inside the Security tab, prior to reinitialisation.
