Upload Pandas dataframe to HANA database using HDBCLI / DBAPI - python-3.x

Question

I connect to HANA database from Python and read any given table from a schema into a Pandas dataframe using the following code:
from hdbcli import dbapi
conn = dbapi.connect(
address=XXXX,
port=32015,
user="username",
password="password",
)
schema = <schema_name>
tablename = <table name>
pd.read_sql(f'select * from {schema}.{tablename}',conn)
This code works without any issue - I am able to download the table into a Pandas Data Frame.
However, I am unable to upload any Pandas Data Frame back to HANA db, even if it is the same schema.
xy.to_sql('new_table',conn)
I tried to even pre-define the table to which to upload in HANA Studio, and define its columns and data types. Nonetheless, I get the following error:
DatabaseError: Execution failed on sql 'SELECT name FROM sqlite_master WHERE type='table' AND name=?;': (259, 'invalid table name: Could not find table/view SQLITE_MASTER in schema <RANDOM_SCHEMA>: line 1 col 18 (at pos 17)')
It is important to note that the <RANDOM_SCHEMA> in the above error is not the same schema that was defined above, but it is the my username for HANA Studio.
I thought that since I can read the table into Data Frame, I should be able to write the data frame into a HANA DB table. Am I wrong? What am I missing?

Answer 1

For some reason the code tries to read from a SQLlite catalog table sqlite_master and that table doesn’t exist on HANA (or any other DBMS that is not SQLlite).
Not sure if PANDAS can be configured to use different DBMS differently.
However, for HANA there is a “machine learning” python library available that provides easy integration of dataframes with the HANA database.