Introduction

This spring I taught a business intelligence class and SAP HANA at my university where I am a professor. I had 18 computer science and IT majors in the class and decided to pilot the new HANA curriculum at the SAP University Alliance. This demo is based on some of their work.

The Tables and Data Load

First, we created four tables for customer, stores, products and sales transactions. Then we kept loading 1.05 million rows to the sales fact table using the BusinessObjects Data Services ETL tool. We re-ran the job with different keys until we had filled the fact table with more than 426,000,000 rows (click on image if you want to see the details)

Figure 1: the Sales Fact Table

The Views

Then we created attribute views for customer, store and products as well as an analytical view joining the attribute views to the transactional table. This view is the logical presentation of a star-schema that is used in our dashboards.

 Figure 2: The HANA Analytical View for reporting

The BusinessObjects Demo

We then used 2 sales dashboards on top of the HANA view, and for good measure we added one more dashboard from General ledger that did not use the view, as well as more tools based on Microsoft Analysis Services data sources. This included BusinessObjects WebI report, a Crystal Report and BusinessObjects Analysis. All of which were executed in parallel in a BI Workspace creating a true test of HANA and the BOBJ tools.

The Demo  

This demo shows the HANA tables and the resulting BusinessObjects workspace with HANA and non-HANA sourced data. Pay particularly attention to the fact that the HANA system is in Germany, the BI system is in the USA and the user (me) is in a different location. And, we still see less than 12 seconds load time on all components (who said SAP is slow? J). Take a look of what now is possible in this short demo.

Next Time and BI 2013 Amsterdam

Next time we will look at other less known partitioning options for HANA Administrators and developers. Meanwhile, join me in Amsterdam next month for the BI 2013 conference where we take an in-depth look at HANA as well as some of the Dashbaord design options....

Thanks,

Dr. Berg

INTRODUCTION

Many organizations that are currently using SAP BW and BI on relational databases are struggeling with the first steps in planning and executing their BW to HANA migration efforts.

In this video blog we look at what is new in the 2nd edition of the SAP HANA book from SAP Press, and also dives into the new automated programs that can assist you in your migration project with practical advice and examples.

5 key steps on How to Execute your BW to SAP HANA Move

(select high resolution if you are using a big-screen and turn on sound). 

Meanwhile, I am preparing a demo with 420+ million rows with 3 dashboards, WebI, Analysis, Crystal Report and more that I will be sharing on this blog later this week after Sapphire..  Stay tuned :-)

Dr. Berg

By Dr. Berg

Background

During development of SAP BW Extract Transforms and data Load (ETL) there are many options to create transformations in DTPs in BW 7.x and in older Update and Transfer rules in BW 3.x. Unfortunately, depending on your developers, some of the custom transforms may have sub-optimal ABAP coding can have impacts on how SAP BW ETL performs after the migration to HANA.

Thankfully, SAP’s talented developer Marc Bernard provides an automated tool to help you identify potential coding issues. This program is called the “SAP NetWeaver BW ABAP Routine Analyzer”, or technically ZBW_ABAP_ANALYZER.

Figure 1: Input Screen for SAP NetWeaver BW ABAP Routine Analyzer

Overall, the tool looks for and suggests the following fixes:

• a. Select for all entries (SFAE) statements without HANA DB hints --> add hints
• b. Select * --> specify fields to select
• c. Database access in the field routines --> move to start routine
• d. Loops which do not assign field symbols --> use field symbols
• e. Selects from master data tables --> Use the read master data rule
• f. Selects from DSOs --> Use the read DSO rule
• g. Direct updates to BW object tables --> Do not update tables directly
• h. and many more areas...

You can run this program either as on-line, or as a background job. If you run the program on-line (only recommended for a small selection), you can click a link in the output to edit the transformation, transfer rule or update rule.  

Figure 2: On-Line Output for SAP NetWeaver BW ABAP Routine Analyzer

If you run in the background, you can save a log to SLG1 and also create a spool list for further analysis.

Figure 3: SAP NetWeaver BW ABAP Routine Analyzer - On-Line Spool list

For organizations that have slow data loads where most of the time is used on transforms and loads, this is a key program that should be run as part of the BW HANA migration planning. The tool should be available for general access in April this year.

Some Observations

The last six weeks in this HANA blog series we have looked at many of the HANA migration tools that Marc and SAP has provided, and I continue to be amazed at both the quality and the speed at which SAP is rolling out tools to make any HANA migration as easy as possible.

In the next blog we will look an in-depth look at some of the ways you can balance the load on the nodes in a HANA system when working with a scale out environment.

Thanks,

Dr. Berg

- By Dr. Berg

Sizing Tool Background and Settings

This program is attached to SAP Note 1736976 and can be downloaded from SAP Marketplace and run on a production system to get very accurate sizing information.

This includes sizing for RAM and dynamic runtime memory, log space and disk space. It even provides details on items such as data sizes with corresponding dynamic runtime memory for row store and column stores, as well as the calculated size and the estimated size in HANA memory for each table in your BW system. Technically, the program uses sampling of the database for sizing, so you should refresh the database statistics before running the program.

 Figure 1: HANA Sizing Program for SAP NetWeaver BW

The higher precision you run the estimate at (selected by radio buttons in Figure 1), the longer the program is going to run. With 14 parallel processors and 8Tb data warehouse, it is not unusual to see 45-75 minutes run time. To increase speed, you can also suppress analysis tables with less than 1 MB size.

In addition, since timeouts are common when running this sizing program, you should temporarily change the parameter in rdisp/max_wprun_time to 0. You can do this in BW Transaction RZ11. Finally, you estimate the growth for the system over a time period. This can be done as a percentage, or as absolute growth in GB.

After all this is done, you have downloaded and installed the program, and selected the parameters above, you can go to Transaction SE38 and run SDF/HANA_BW_SIZING as a background job.

Figure 2: SAP HANA Sizing Results

The output is stored in the file you specified and the file can now be emailed to to hardware vendors for sizing input and hardware selection.

Need more Information?

If you have any questions, just stop by my sessions at SAP BI 2013 Conference in Las Vaegs next week (March 19-22); Amsterdam (June 11-13) or in Singapore in September where I will cover more on these timely topics and also do a HANA book signining event with SAP Press...

Look forward to see you there..

Dr. Berg

Automated HANA Readiness Tool

In version 2.x of this tool available since December 2012, hundreds of checks are done automatically in the BW system. This includes platform checks on database and application and system information.

There are even basis checks for support packs, ABAP/JAVA stacks, Unicode, BW releases, and add-ons to your system. The program is found in SAP Note 1729988, and the tool provided automatic check programs for both the 3.5 version and the 7.x version of BW

FIGURE 1: INPUT FOR SELECTING READINESS CHECKS FOR BW TO HANA MIGRATION

First you enter the checks you want to perform to see if your system is ready for a HANA Migration. This should include most of the options seen in the figure above, such as basis and database, but you also can choose to ignore customer objects or checks you are planning to run at a later time.

The idea of the checklist tool from SAP is that you run it several times throughout the project. Once before you start, then periodically as you resolve issues and upgrade requirements, and then finally when the system has been migrated to HANA. This last step is important, since the checklist tool also has specific checks for the HANA system that can help you identify any issues before turning over the system to end users. If the tool shows a ‘red’ flag, you should resolve this before starting your HANA migration, or if a new red flag shows up, fix it before completing the migration.

FIGURE 2: BW READNIESS RESULTS FOR HANA MIGRATION

The output results in a list of actions that should be undertaken before the migration starts. In our example, we can see that for our system database patch 110 should be applied as part of our preparation steps.

Getting Started

If you want to try this program in your system, simply install the latest version from SAP Marketplace in note 1729988 and then execute the program using ZBW_HANA_CHECKLIST for those on a BW 7.x system, or ZBW_HANA_CHECKLIST_3X for those on older BW 3.x systems.  The tool even allows you to download any recommended SAP notes to fix issues found in the check through the automated transaction call of SNOTE. This program should be executed by anyone who is in the planning stages of a BW to HANA migration.

More Information at SAP BI 2013 in Las Vegas

Next month at BI 2013 in Las Vegas, I will be showing more tools and give a detailed presentation on how to create “Strategies for budgeting, planning, and sizing your SAP NetWeaver BW on SAP HANA project”. The session will be at the MGM on Tuesday, March 19, from 12:00 to 1:15 pm.  

During the conference I will also be signing copies of the SAP HANA Book I wrote for SAP press with Penny Silvia and you can stop by to see me at the ‘meet-the-expert’ session and get your HANA questions answered…

Hope to see you there...

Dr. Berg