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Author's profile photo Hüseyin Bilgen

DB Size decreased by 81%? Awesome

In my previous blog (How to Decrease Your SAP Database Size?) I gave all known options to decrease the Total DB size of SAP Solutions. The fastest and may be the cheapest method is using an alternative database software.

The Dino’s in IT still doesn’t believe in databases other than Oracle, but nowadays it is easy to say that they are wrong. With the 64-bit technology evolution, all databases performs quite well.

This weekend, in Turkey,  at one of the biggest Retail customers, we did an export and import of ERP production system which is already running Windows 2008/Sql Server 2008. But their database doesn’t have ROW and PAGE compressions.

So we decided to export and import the database to lower DB size.

Results

Total DB Size (prior to operation): 5200 GB

Total DB Size (after SQL 2008 R2 conversion*): 1000 GB

Export/Import Duration (done in parallel): 60 Hours

Space BeneFIT: ~ 81 %

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* SQL 2008 R2 Conversion: Here, the meaning of conversion is exporting the database and importing again on a SQL 2008 R2 version database with latest SAP Kernel 7.0 to enable ROW and PAGE compressions.

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      6 Comments
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      Author's profile photo Ramesh Thalluru
      Ramesh Thalluru

      But why do you want to export and import? Why did not you use MSSCOMPRESS program? just curious...

      Author's profile photo Hüseyin Bilgen
      Hüseyin Bilgen
      Blog Post Author

      Hi RT,

      Good point and we have an answer 🙂

      The customers SQL Datafile distribution and file sizes, even the datafile number has to be organized. That's why decided to export/import.

      Author's profile photo Ramesh Thalluru
      Ramesh Thalluru

      So export/import is the only way to distribute the data evenly among the data files?

      What tool do you use to export/import? System copy procedure?

      Author's profile photo Hüseyin Bilgen
      Hüseyin Bilgen
      Blog Post Author

      Hi again,

      We used standart SAP System Copy Tools for Export/Import.

      Using System Copy Tools is the easiest, standart and fast method to meet these requirements.

      Author's profile photo Former Member
      Former Member

      Hii..
      even I had reduced the size of my ERP 6.0 EHP5 system by 71%...
      The application is awesome...
      It is not possible for me to take export-import as a downtime for ERP is not possible...
      I hav read about shrinking datafiles... and creating primary index after tht...
      has any one done this before.. ??

      Author's profile photo Hüseyin Bilgen
      Hüseyin Bilgen
      Blog Post Author

      Hi,

      Yesterday I did use MSSCOMPRESS report to compress tables & indices on our IDES server. We've Windows 2008R2 and SQL 2008 R2 with 180 GB (%0 free) Database. The tables have ROW compress so we expect %40-%50 reduction in DB size before we started. We ran the report in background and it finished in 12 hours. The DB now have 94 GB free space (%52). We'll shring the datafiles to save disk space.