SAP NW Newbie

Today I learned that you can avoid using UP2 work process on an SAP BW system. UP2 work process is used for statistical updates. In a NetWeaver ABAP Application Server, if you do not use a UP2 work process, its functions are taken over by UPD process. Given that the data is not written in to the BW database as frequently as in the case of a  transactional system, UPD process is not so much loaded. Therefore you can stop worrying about contention on UPD work process and let it perform UP2's job.

Companies tend to avoid maintaining hardware and software by signing up with vendors for using them as a service. X amount of hardware or software capacity used for y amount of time is what companies look for. The following as-a-service options are popularly available to help companies that look for consuming software and hardware rather than maintaining them: Infrastructure as a Service  - IaaS - provides you with the actual hardware and firmware, but lets you decide what goes on top. Platform as a Service  - PaaS - provides you with IaaS, as well as a general runtime (OS, programming language environments, databases etc). Software as a Service  - SaaS - provides you with PaaS, but also includes the software you want to run (anything from email to accounting); all you have to do is provide the data. So why did I start this blog with a picture of pizza? There is a Pizza as a Service analogy floating around trying to explain this concept with ...

PANKS is a tool that searches for SAP Notes and KBAs from the performance assistant based on the ABAP error code and context. When you click on  Search for SAP-Notes / KBAs  icon, the system searches for SAP Notes and KBAs based on the following passed information: Transaction (except SE38, SA38, and SE80) Program(s) Message class and message number Check SAP note  2020356 for pre-requisites, restrictions and dependencies. This tool is different from Automated Note Search Tool (ANST).

OpenSAP has announced some new courses on SAP BusinessObjects Cloud and SAP Digital Boardroom powered by SAP BusinessObjects Cloud. While I am yet to learn about SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise, prospects of learning these new solutions created some confusion. So I took it upon myself to find out what these products are all about. SAP has been branding its products on analytics around BusinessObjects. BO has been a known brand name in analytics, so why rename and spoil that brand. Naturally BO is the name to go after. The on-premise solutions for analytics are delivered as  SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise . This product is available in three variants: Premium, Professional and Standard; in the decreasing order of functionalities delivered. Given the push for software-as-a-service or on-cloud products, SAP has introduced a cloud variant of BOE. They call it  SAP BusinessObjects Cloud . They originally called it  SAP Cloud for Analytics, but stuck to ...

Today I learned about a  guide finder to search for SAP NetWeaver installation, upgrade and update guides . Search and get links to installation/upgrade/update guides quickly. Link to the guide finder:  https://cp.hana.ondemand.com/dps/d/preview/ec5624d5073d4c949b42bf284742748d/1.0/en-US/frameset.htm

Today I learned that an IO bottleneck in Oracle can be reduced significantly if the database is reorganized. We had a problem with a badly designed database file layout. SAP application, Oracle data files and the redo logs were all configured to be stored on a single disk. A higher than normal load on SAP system caused the entire system to crawl. Quickly checking a few transactions, which included ST06, showed that the response time of disks was very high, more than 500 ms. Before planning to redistribute the data files and redo logs away to a new disk, someone wanted to try a DB reorganization. When you reorganize the database, the fragmentation of data is reduced. So a read requires fewer blocks to be read and thus reduces the load on the disk. After the DB was reorged, problem was gone!

Unless you are good with remembering numbers, you can't just look at the version number information of MS Windows or MS SQL Server and tell what the release, SP levels etc are. To quickly establish a correlation, you can use these two resources: Operating System Version (Windows) Microsoft SQL Server Version List For a quick reference, I have copied the latest information here: Operating system Version number Windows 10 10.0* Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 10.0* Windows 8.1 6.3* Windows Server 2012 R2 6.3* Windows 8 6.2 Windows Server 2012 6.2 Windows 7 6.1 Windows Server 2008 R2 6.1 Windows Server 2008 6 Windows Vista 6 Windows Server 2003 R2 5.2 Windows Server 2003 5.2 Windows XP 64-Bit Edition 5.2 Windows XP 5.1 Windows 2000 5 * For applications that have been manifested for Windows 8.1 or Windows 10. Applications not manifested for Windows 8.1 or Windows 10 will return the Windows 8 OS version value (6.2). RTM  (no  SP ) SP1 SP2 SP...

Today I learned that apart from archiving old data to a file system, you have an option to store the data on a separate database, so that BW queries on old data can still be used for reporting. This is very useful when using BW on HANA. SAP BW powered by HANA, uses a multitemparature concept when deciding which data must be stored in memory and which data to push out of memory. The data on which reporting is done on a daily basis is HOT data. The data on which reporting is not daily or when you don't do any reporting at all (ex PSA tables and write optimised dso tables containing corporate memory) is WARM data. Warm data is offloaded from memory, when there is memory problem, to disk. This still ties the data to the database and is included with database backups and restore. SAP HANA uses a separate engine to carry out the dynamic tiering concept to offload such data. The data that does not change (historical data) can be shifted to a near line storage. F...

SAP S/4 HANA is a simplification of SAP ERP. The product is not a complete replacement of ERP yet. It began with simplification of finance code of ECC, with Simple Finance. In other terms SAP has replaced the code meant for the finance piece in ECC with a code that takes advantages of the technical capabilities of HANA and ignores other databases. This means that that code will only work on SAP HANA database. SAP is slowly simplifying other modules. Slowly the ECC part is being replaced by S4 Core. Now that S/4 HANA is not a complete replacement of ECC, it will have the other modules using the same old code, written on ECC, compatible with all the DBs. This way S/4 HANA stays as a compete product as ECC is. Does this mean that everything is being replaced? Apparently not. SAP has Succesfactors as its strategic HCM solution. So it will continue to develop HCM part in the compatible way (that works on AnyDB and HANA) With the evolution of S/4 HANA, the other SAP products are ...

Today I learned that  SAP HANA Essentials eBook by Jeffrey Word  is available for free in EPUB and  kindle  formats on  http://www.saphanabook.com/ Click on Free Download link and enter 52F98A1C as the code.

Stopping SAP HANA You can stop SAP HANA system from OS level using one of the following commands: HDB stop /usr/sap/<SID>/SYS/exe/hdb/sapcontrol -prot NI_HTTP -nr <NN> -function StopSystem HDB To stop HANA from HANA Studio Right-click on the system Choose " Configuration and Monitoring " and " Stop System " (you will be prompted to provide OS credentials) You can verify the status of SAP HANA system using the following commands sapcontrol -prot NI_HTTP -nr <NN> -function GetSystemInstanceList HDB info After shutdown hdbrsutil process will be running to keep row tables in memory. This allows for a faster HANA startup. If you wish to stop these processes (for example to reboot the host server), run the following command hdbrsutil -f -k -p <port number (e.g. 3xx03)> You can find the port number from the command "HDB proc" Starting SAP HANA You can start SAP HANA system from OS level using one of the followi...

Today I learned about BOE and Data Services patch history tool. You can download it from  SCN wiki page : Here is how you use it Download and unzip  PatchHistory.jar  to the SAP BusinessObjects InstallData folder (for example C:\Program Files (x86)\SAP BusinessObjects\InstallData) or copy the file  InstallManifest.sqlite  to the same folder as your PatchHistory.jar (note: Java 1.6 is required) Double click the PatchHistory.jar (alternatively, launch the program using the command java -jar PatchHistory.jar) A .csv file is generated Open the .csv in Excel