The German Presales Team @SAP is currently running some HANA Developer Days. When preparing the Hands-On classes we discussed on how to give the attendees all required tools at hand – preferred without any installation. Playing around in HANA studio config, I discovered a way on how to make HANA studio for Windows portable with these simple steps:

  • Install Java Runtime on any machine meeting the desired architecture (Win32,Win64), e.g. to Program Files\Java\jre7
  • Install HANA Studio on the same machine, e.g. to Program Files\SAP\hdbstudio
  • copy or move the Java Runtime to the HANA Studio folder, e.g. to Program Files\SAP\hdbstudio\jre
  • edit hdbstudio.ini, locate the -vm entry: 
    -vm
C:\Program Files\Java\jre7\bin\javaw.exe
  • change that entry to contain the relative path to the jre: 
    -vm
./jre/bin/javaw.exe

Now you can copy the hdbstudio folder to a USB stick and launch it on every machine meeting the same architecture. If you need to install additional software into HANA Studio (e.g. the SAPUI5 Development Tool Kit or the HANA Cloud Tools), just do that. It will be persistet in the relative path aswell.
One thing to consider: launching hdbstudio and the jre from an USB device might be very slow, the same with copying a folder with thousands of thousands of files. To bypass this, we’ve zipped the folder and let the attendees copy the zipped folder to their machines to unzip and launch locally.