SAP Basis Training Material.

SAP Basis Training Material.

SAP BW Training Material.

SAP BW Training Material.

SAP NetWeaver Landscape Virtualization Management - Concept

Nice to see SAP come-up with SAP NetWeaver Landscape Virtualization Management Concept. For new SAP Installations it is better to start with and automate the process to do system copy and Renaming SAP System.

Visit the following link for Documentation and Install:

http://bit.ly/LOZzjR

How to get a HPROF heap dump in JAVA Stack?

How to get a HPROF heap dump in JAVA Stack?
Are you running an AS Java Weekstone with SAP JVM...
 •Use the ConfigTool to configure the following VM parameters:
 -XX:+HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError
 -XX:+HeapDumpOnCtrlBreak
•In SAP MMC right-click on the AS Java server process and select Dump Stack Trace
•The heap file is written to the working directory of the server, e.g. /usr/sap//J/j2ee/cluster/server/

...or a plain Java Application?
 •If you are running a SAP JVM, use ~/bin/jvmmon.exe
•On a Sun or HP VM please see the table below.

All options to get an HPROF dump in detail...
via Java VM parameters (see ConfigTool on how to set those for AS Java installations):
 •-XX:+HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError writes heap dump on OutOfMemoryError (recommended)
•-XX:+HeapDumpOnCtrlBreak writes heap dump together with thread dump on CTRL+BREAK (recommended; use SAP MMC to trigger dumps for AS Java installations)
•-agentlib:hprof=heap=dump,format=b combines the above two settings (old way; not recommended as the VM frequently dies after CTRL+BREAK with strange errors)
 

SAP Revamps Enhancement Package Strategy, Extends Maintenance

In an effort to simplify upgrades, and chiefly the testing processes involved, SAP will break up enhancement packages into smaller, vertically and industry-focused pieces that its customers can implement incrementally.

The updates in smaller pieces will come out every quarter. Customers will have the option to implement them in several ways—a node, a support pack or as an add-on to a support pack. Customers can access the updates through Solution Manager or via the Innovation Roadmap on the SAP Service Marketplace.

“The enhancement pack was a collection of hundreds of innovations bundled into one package. But customers want smaller, digestible pieces,” says Bernd Leukert, EVP and Corporate Officer for SAP Business Suite Applications. “They want to select which pieces to install and which to ignore.”

In turn, SAP extended maintenance and support for ERP 6.0 and Business Suite 7 products for five years, from December 2015 to December 2020. The maintenance and support schedule covers NetWeaver and all current enhancement packages for the Business Suite. Customers still have a choice between Standard Support at 17 percent and Enterprise Support at 22 percent of net licensing fees.

The plan is for enhancement packages to come out every two to three years (Innovation 2011 will be delivered in November), and all previous enhancement packages shipped already to market will remain available. But over time, the importance of the enhancement package will be reduced as SAP delivers more flexible ways of upgrading customers’ existing systems, according to SAP. Enhancement packages will be mostly for customers starting a new implementation, Leukert says.

These smaller enhancements will include, for instance, widgets for end users to design their own user interfaces without IT’s assistance or any modifying of the SAP back-end. Business analytics enhancements are also planned.

“We want to show the difference with Oracle, which is pushing customers to a disruptive strategy with Fusion,” Leukert says. “If they stay on the current release, they are not able to consume innovations.”

SAP's HANA is hot, but still in early Stages..Taking Baby Steps..

The potential of SAP's HANA in-memory computing engine permeated the agenda and had attendees' tongues wagging this week at the Tech Ed conference in Las Vegas, but the technology still has some maturing to do.

SAP has relentlessly promoted HANA since its launch in May 2010, touting its ability to quickly analyze large amounts of business data and reporting major early interest from customers. Over time, SAP plans to weave HANA throughout its portfolio as part of a sweeping "renewal," but in reality, the product only went into general availability in June, and detailed stories of customers successfully using it in production have so far been scarce.

One person who has worked on a number of HANA proof-of-concept (POC) exercises said Tuesday that while HANA's technology works well, customers should expect some bumps in the road and a fair amount of effort before they get the results.

"The most important thing is, don't do [a POC] just to test the technology," said Harald Reiter of Deloitte Consulting, during a presentation on the Tech Ed show floor that drew a sizable throng of onlookers. Customers should start a HANA project with a solid use case in mind, "something you really want to go live with," that justifies the financial investment, he said.
Right now, he said, customers have limited choices: Either use one of the few packaged analytic applications SAP has so far released for HANA, or build something from scratch. "Those are the hard ones."

Customers should take pains to line up a full-fledged, dedicated HANA team, according to Reiter. The roster should include a project manager, solution architect, HANA administrator, data services architect, data modeler, security expert and developers, he said.
Part of the challenges Reiter faced on his projects was the fact that SAP has been issuing updates to HANA in rapid-fire fashion.

While the patches often were to fix bugs and are "technically painless to implement," they still require testing to be redone, he said. In addition, at times the updated version of HANA behaved differently from the last.

Data modeling is the key to squeezing the best performance out of HANA, so the data modeler member of the team is most important, Reiter said. HANA's performance can be "totally different from one data model to the next," he added.

SAP has partnered with a number of hardware vendors for HANA, which is available as an appliance in a number of sizes with system RAM varying accordingly.

Customers should realize that a considerable portion of system RAM is going to be consumed by processing, leaving less room for data storage, he said. Companies will want to use HANA to run historical analyses on all of their data but that will be difficult with a smaller appliance, even when HANA's data compression capability is factored in, he said.

Overall, customers should "expect the unexpected," Reiter said. "SAP really helps you, but you have to plan ahead. Don't think this is going to work right away."

SAP has made much of HANA's "pipeline," or backlog of sales leads, saying it is the fastest-growing in company history. While that may be the case, many of its customers are likely years away from considering an investment in HANA for various reasons.

Columbia Sportswear is now involved in a major ERP (enterprise-resource-planning) system migration, and adding a HANA project now would cause too much complexity, said Bob Kaila, SAP basis manager.
"We're doing a complete company transformation. [HANA] is something the higher-ups are very, very interested in, but being where we are right now, we're taking on so much change in the company, we just don't want to add another product that we have to ramp up internally."

Columbia uses Teradata as its core data warehousing platform. HANA would probably end up being used in conjunction with Teradata, versus replacing it, since currently Columbia has a great many applications tied into it, including non-SAP products, he said.

One of HANA's initial customers, the large medical products company Medtronic, is set to go live on the system in October after a three-month project, said architect Kiran Musunuru during a presentation.

Medtronic initially will use HANA for two applications, one of which is aimed at global complaint handling. Medtronic serves millions of patients a year, and wants to analyze complaints that come in quickly so problems with products can be resolved as soon as possible, he said.

Medtronic's HANA system is running on a Cisco hardware-based appliance with 512GB of RAM. The company used Sybase's PowerDesigner tool to build an integrated data model constituting a range of source systems, he said.

The project faced assorted challenges, he said. For one, HANA's newness meant there were no best practices to follow. In the end, Medtronic decided to hire an SAP consultant to help with the work.

In a few weeks, Medtronic will start seeing HANA in full-fledged action.

"As of now, everything works fine," he said.

Will HANA impact ABAP Programming style?

Traditional ABAP Programming style is more inclined towards reducing the load on Database and shifting the processing to Application server. This is more to do with Data Storage models and SAP 3-tier system architecture provided another layer for data processing. This restricted ABAP developers to confine to the concept of “pulling required data to Application server and processing data in App Server” and along came the complexities of buffering.

With the introduction of HANA, data is available in volatile memory so data can be retrieved and processed in same “memory”. At first thought, this gives a feeling that ABAP OpenSQL Programming style should be changed and some of the “banned” OpenSQL statements like ‘Order By’ etc should come back in to use. Well, Hold on!! Let’s not jump into conclusions, let’s analyze some specific scenarios from HANA perspective and decide on this –

Scenario-1: There is a database table with 50 records in it and you wish to read the table 1000 times for values based on field F1.

· Non-HANA: Since the database table is relatively small in size, make a copy of the table in your program and then read the desired record as and when required.
· With HANA: Read data from database table as and when required and process it. Remember, with HANA query and data processing is happening at the same place!!!

Scenario-2: Let’s consider opposite scenario to Scenario-1. There is a database table with 10000 records in it and you wish to read the table 100 times for the values based on field F1.

· Non-HANA: Since the database table is very large, it’s better to use SELECT SINGLE than porting the entire table into an internal table.
· With HANA: Same as in Non-HANA read data from database table as and when required and process it. The only advantage here is there is no network traffic with every query as query and data processing is happening at the same place!!!

Scenario-3: Joins Vs Nested Select statements

· Non-HANA: Join is the most preferred way to fetch data from two tables instead of nested select statement. No second thoughts about it from OpenSQL perspective.
· With HANA: Join has its own advantages and Nested select has its own advantages from Relational database perspective. With HANA, the decision to use Join Vs Nested select statement depends on further requirements. If any intermediate processing has to be done, nested select is better than join.

Scenario-4: Optimize the cost of database searches

· HANA or No-HANA, the cost of database search should always be optimized and concept of index is extremely important

Scenario-5: Table buffering

· SAP provides buffering facility to increase performance. Since buffers reside in Application server it takes considerably less time to read data locally than reading it from database.
· With HANA, no additional table buffering is required as all the database resides in volatile memory.

Scenario-6: ABAP Sort Vs Order by clause

· Non-HANA: Optimized solution is to use ABAP Sort and reduce load on Database server
· With HANA: It really doesn’t matter. Both the statements should be equally good or bad.