Dear Reader,
Welcome to my SDN blog. I hope to make this an enjoyable and valuable source of information for you.
I plan to write about my experiences with SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence especially about the Business Planning & Simulation functionality in SAP BW. I will include technical information about system configuration and enhancement capabilities including code snippets (ABAP, JavaScript, HTML).
In my role within the SAP NetWeaver Regional Implementation Group (RIG), I perform many reviews of customer implementations and give talks at various SAP events each year. I will be sharing with you some of the insights gained and lessons learned.
However, this blog should not be a one-way street. I hope to hear from you. Discuss the issues and solutions. Make suggestions for improvements. At SAP, we are always open for ideas on how to better our software or cool ways of enhancing it. Your feedback is very valuable and will help to drive product development in the right direction.
So let's jump right in...
Performance is on everybody's mind when working in an SAP BW System. Here are two quick tips. They seem to be obvious but don't laugh. I have seen the same mistake made over and over. So when I do a performance review, those are the things I check first.
1) Run BW Check Routines
Out of the box, BW comes with a nice tool to check various system settings and data consistency. Start transaction RSRV and see for yourself. In an optimal system, any check that you run should come back with green lights only. If not, there's room for improvement (or some inconsistency that should be fixed).
When it comes to performance, run the checks regarding indexes, database statistics, and database parameters. Save you check run configuration for later use. It makes sense to schedule it to run on a regular basis.
2) Keep Database Statistics Up-to-date
If you don't take care of database statistics, performance of your BW system will degrade over time. The more you use it, the slower it will become. The correct procedure depends on the database that BW is running on.
Typically you should have a job running on a regular basis that updates the DB stats. Check transaction DB13. For Oracle for example, I suggest to schedule the BRCONNECT tool to run on a daily basis. BRCONNECT is smart and will figure out which tables and indexes actually have changed and process only those (be sure to run a current version of the BR*tools). If you have a big production system, you can also set the job to spin off several tasks that run in parallel. This way you can reduce the overall runtime and make more room in you nightly batch window for other processes.
Best,
Marc Bernard
@marcfbe
