Connect to SAP HANA Using Python

Create a virtual environment to localize dependencies:

python -m venv venv

Activate the virtual environment:

source ./venv/bin/activate

After activating the virtual environment, you should see (venv) in front of your Linux user in your bash shell. For example:

If you’re on Windows:

.\venv\Scripts\activate

Create a dependency file and name it requirements.txt:

hdbcli
### add other dependencies below ###

Install the dependencies:

pip install -r requirements.txt

The dependencies will be saved in your venv directory.

Install the hdbcli package:

pip install hdbcli

Install the hdbcli package:

pip install hdbcli

Now that you’ve successfully connected to the database, we need to take out connection parameters and credentials out of the source code. Having connection parameters directly in your source code is insecure, one option is to provide these parameters at runtime as environment variables instead.

Export your environment variables to your bash profile through your preferred method.

export HOST="<Database Host>"
export PORT="<Database Port>"
export DB_USER="<Database User>"
export DB_PW="<Password>"

We’ll use the os package in Python to access these environment variables to connect.

from hdbcli import dbapi
import os

conn = dbapi.connect(
    address=os.environ['HOST'],
    port=os.environ['PORT'],
    user=os.environ['DB_USER'],
    password=os.environ['DB_PW']
)

print('connected')

#test select from dummy table
cursor = conn.cursor()
cursor.execute("SELECT * FROM DUMMY")
for result in cursor:
    print(result)

It isn’t recommended to deploy a production application of this type on Windows.

Export your environment variables

• Database host
• Database port
• Database user
• Password

We’ll use the os package from Python to access these user environment variables.

from hdbcli import dbapi
import os

conn = dbapi.connect(
    address=os.getenv('HOST'),
    port=os.getenv('PORT'),
    user=os.getenv('DB_USER'),
    password=os.getenv('DB_PW')
)

print('connected')

#test select from dummy table
cursor = conn.cursor()
cursor.execute("SELECT * FROM DUMMY")
for result in cursor:
    print(result)