This blog contains experience gained over the years of implementing (and de-implementing) large scale IT applications/software.

Forcefully Prevent HANA Tenant DB From Starting

Scenario: Your HANA system is having some serious memory problems.
In the memory you have remaining you can’t get the SYSTEM database to run, so you can’t stop a particular tenant database.

Here’s how you can use the hdbnsutil utility to prevent hdbdaemon from trying to start a tenant database.
As the <sid>adm user, kill off all remaining HANA system processes:

> hdbdaemon -quit

Export the topology:

> hdbnsutil -exportTopology /tmp/topology_export.txt

Edit the file and change the “status” of the tenant database to be “no”:

> vi /tmp/topology_export.txt

n3>name
v>HT1
n3>status
v>no
n3>timestamp

Save the file and quit vi.
Reload the topology using hdbnsutil:

> hdbnsutil -importTopology

Now restart hdbdaemon:

> hdbdaemon -start