By Dr. Berg

Introduction

These are some of the major tasks for a BW to HANA migration. Once you have added all sub-tasks, a typical workplan has 400-600 detailed items, including status reports, team meetings, issues, hardware validation, portal integration and tests of front-end tools. 

However, these first 76 steps should give you enough to get you started on writing your project plan.

Pre-Activity Steps for each environment (Dev, QA & Prod)

1. Clean the Persistent Staging Area (PSA) for data already loaded to DSOs

2. Delete the Aggregates aggregates (summary tables). They will not be needed again.

3. Compress the E and F tables in all InfoCubes. This will make InfoCubes much smaller.

4. Remove data from the statistical cubes (they start with the technical name of 0CTC_xxx). These contain performance information for the BW system running on the relational database. You can do this using the transaction RSDDSTAT or the program RSDDSTAT_DATA_DELETE to help you.

5. Look at log files, bookmarks and unused BEx queries and templates (transaction RSZDELETE). 6. Remove as much as possible of the DTP temporary storage, DTP error logs, and temporary database objects. Help and programs to do this are found in SAP Notes 1139396 and 1106393.

7. For write-optimized DSOs that push data to reportable DSOs (LSA approach), remove data in the write-optimized DSOs. It is already available in higher level objects.

8. Migrate old data to Near-Line Storage (NLS) on a small server. This will still provide access to the data for the few users who infrequently need to see this old data. You will also be able to query it when BW is on HANA, but it does not need to be in-memory.

10. Remove data in unused DSOs, InfoCubes and files used for staging in the BW system. This includes possible reorganization of masterdata text and attributes using process type in RSPC 11. You may also want to clean up background information stored in the table RSBATCHDATA. This table can get very big if not managed.

12. You should also consider archiving any IDocs and clean the tRFC queues. All of this will reduce size of the HANA system and help you fit the system tables on the master node.

13. Size reduction of Basis Tables. In SAP Note 706478, SAP provides some ideas on how to keep the basis tables from growing too fast too fast in the future.

14. As of Service Pack 23 on BW 7.0, we can also delete unwanted master data directly (see SAP Note: 1370848).

15. Use the program RSDDCVER_DIM_UNUSED to delete any unused dimension entries in your InfoCubes to reduce the overall system size (not a factor if you plan on using the optimized HANA infocubes)

Pre-Validation steps

16. Run BW to HANA Migration Readiness Check (v2.0) in  SAP Note 1729988 and resolve all high priority issues including connectivity checks, service packs, security, basis, db notes and general check in the tool for SB, Dev, QA and Prod.

17. Run ZBW_ABAP_ANALYZER for checks of ETL ABAP code and fix outstanding issues in SB, Dev, QA and Prod. Add HANA hints where required. This is found in  SAP Note 1847431

18. Run full delta load and gather benchmark performance statistics for load and activations

20. Run key queries, reports and dashboards for collection of benchmark statistics and performance, including any BEx broadcaster jobs, pre-calculations and workbooks.

- Other: 

a) Conduct HANA development workshops

b) Complete HANA Admin workshop and training

c) Create an SLA and Support plan for SAP HANA internally

d) Confirm Backup, Disaster recovery and HA plan

Environment staging and Migration (post hardware install, validation and handover)

21. Run backup of database in SAP BW Sandbox

22. Suspend jobs and SB development activities

23. Migrate Database to SAP HANA (export and import)

24. Connectivity validations and security checks (roles, authentication and authorization)

25. External job scheduling checks (openhub and outbound interfaces)

26. Execute key queries identified in step 20 and reconcile data at summary level and detailed as required.

27. Collect new HANA performance statistics for dashboards, BEX broadcaster, reports, workbooks and WAD templates and analyze performance gains.

28. Run full Delta Loads from process chains (create a few records in the source environment if required) and collect benchmark statistics from ETL processing and activation. Analyze these against those collected in step 18.

29. Rerun the HANA Migration Readiness Check  in  SAP Note 1729988 and resolve any issues

30 Go / No-Go decision

31. Run backup of database in SAP BW Development environment

32. Suspend jobs and development activities in the development environment

33. Migrate Database to SAP HANA (technical migration export and import)

34. Connectivity validations and security checks (roles, authentication and authorization)

35. External job scheduling checks (openhub and outbound interfaces)

36. Execute key queries identified in step 20 and reconcile data at summary level and detailed as required.

37. Collect new HANA performance statistics for dashboards, BEX broadcaster, reports, workbooks and WAD templates and analyze performance gains.

38. Run full Delta Loads from process chains (create a few records in the source environment if required) and collect benchmark statistics from ETL processing and activation. Analyze these against those collected in step 18.

39. Rerun the HANA Migration Readiness Check  in  SAP Note 1729988 and resolve any issues

40 Go / No-Go decision

41. Refresh QA box from Prod if feasible

42. Run backup of database in SAP BW QA environment

43. Suspend jobs and transports in the QA environment

44. Migrate Database to SAP HANA (technical migration export and import)

45. Connectivity validations and security checks (roles, authentication and authorization)

46. External job scheduling checks (openhub and outbound interfaces)

47. Execute key queries identified in step 20 and reconcile data at summary level and detailed as required.

48. Collect new HANA performance statistics for dashboards, BEX broadcaster, reports, workbooks and WAD templates and analyze performance gains.

49. Run full Delta Loads from process chains (create a few records in the source environment if required) and collect benchmark statistics from ETL processing and activation. Analyze these against those collected in step 18.

50. Rerun the HANA Migration Readiness Check  in  SAP Note 1729988 and resolve any issues

Other:

a) Test backup/restore capabilities

b) Test and collect benchmarks for High Availability and/or Disaster Recovery

51 Go / No-Go decision

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52. Develop detailed Production cutover plan with times steps for export and import of files.

53. Develop production validation test plan and assign resources

54. Run backup of database in SAP BW QA environment

55. Suspend jobs and transports in the QA environment

56. Migrate Database to SAP HANA (technical migration export and import)

57. Connectivity validations and security checks (roles, authentication and authorization)

58. External job scheduling checks (openhub and outbound interfaces)

59. Execute key queries identified in step 20 and reconcile data at summary level and detailed as required.

60. Collect new HANA performance statistics for dashboards, BEX broadcaster, reports, workbooks and WAD templates and analyze performance gains.

61. Run full Delta Loads from process chains  and collect benchmark statistics from ETL processing and activation. Analyze these against those collected in step 18.

62. Rerun the HANA Migration Readiness Check  in  SAP Note 1729988 and resolve any issues

63. User migration and log-on validation

64. Setup Alerts in SAP HANA Studio

65. Assign System roles and privileges in all environments

66. Setup basepaths for all backups

67. Validate CPU usage, memory footprint and system load during test run for reports and data loads.

68. Create a standard operating procedure for SAP HANA support staff

69. Setup update site and process for HANA studio (SUM), license keys and support

70. Go/No-Go Decision (restore)

71. Optional: Optimize key DSOs to new HANA optimized DSOs

72. Optional: Optimize key InfoCubes to new HANA optimized InfoCubes (flattened dimensions)

73. Optional: remove partitions from LSA and simplify data architecture by reducing layers

74. Optional: Create a New capabilities assessment to take advantage of near-time data warehousing using SLA

75. Optional: setup external data movement into new Data Services ETL processing chains

76. Optional: Start removing InfoCubes and build HANA views on DSOs where appropriate, thereby reducing data replication, size and data latency (non-IP, BPC and non-cumulative KFs).

Summary

While not a complete workplan, these tasks can function as the skeleton and starting point for your more detailed workplan with timelines and assigned resources specific to your organization and scope.

Hope it helps..

Dr. Berg 

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