Former Member

August 7, 2013 1 minute read

Setting up BW Near-Line Storage with SAP Sybase IQ

It feels strange for me to make a post in the BW section as I feel horribly un-qualified to do this 😛

Below is a Video that Ethan Jewett and I co-created as part of the DSLayered video podcast series.

What we did was use the new and now native NLS functionality in BW 7.3 SP9 to archive data off into SAP Sybase IQ. This is something that I have been talking about for years (see this blog post dated 12 months ago) as I have had exposure to the PBS NLS add-on from my Sybase background.

You will be glad to know that the results were simply awesome and I feel that by implementing NLS now as part of your BW strategy could benefit customers in a few ways, namely:

Get the immediate performance benefit of using SAP Sybase IQ ( ** spoiler alert ** SAP Sybase IQ was +- 300 % faster off the DSO level compared to BW running off an InfoCube)
Shrink the size of the database under-lying your BW environment. This has many benefits:
1. Smaller environment to query on = better performance
2. Smaller environment to back up
3. Etc etc
Get customers ready for HANA and know that you have a seamless and slick archiving solution in place with no performance trade-offs. This also means that you do not have to panic about your HANA environment running away from you.

I would love to hear every-ones thoughts/opinions on this and I hope I got all the BW terminology correct 😉

Get the popcorn ready and enjoy the video

7 Comments

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Ethan Jewett

August 7, 2013 at 3:37 pm

Thanks for posting this Clint!

Just some links to more info for the convenience of readers:

The document introducing IQ-based NLS for SP09 is here and includes links to lots of other resources.

The PDF that we referenced in the video, which includes pretty much all the (relatively minor) installation steps is here (click on the "View this document" button).

Former Member

August 8, 2013 at 11:08 am

Clint, Ethan,

thanks for this nice video and very visual explanation. Some thoughts came to my mind on this matter which you might be able to add:

- BW on HANA is as you mentioned the way to go, yet the addition of nearline could help to make sure that the HANA instance is not growing too big. Do you have any speed analysis for the NLS on IQ with HANA ?

- Would the IQ require any special / specific infrastructure in order to support the scenario ?

Former Member

August 9, 2013 at 3:13 pm

Hay Carsten,

Thanks for the reply.

To answer your questions:

No analysis yet as neither Ethan Jewett or I have access to a BW on HANA instance ( nudge nudge wink wink to vendors 🙂 ) but based on my work on HANA stand alone I assume the performance would be blazing all around
Nothing specific on IQ. I have had a lot more success running IQ on physical machines rather than VM's so that would be my only real tip... well that and making sure IQ has the correct memory allocation as per the sizing guide.

I know both Ethan Jewett and I would love to give the BW on HANA with IQ a go so let's see what we can arrange.

Thanks again !

Clint

Former Member

August 9, 2013 at 5:52 pm

Hey Clint,

It was a very nice one & gud stuff u have..

Regards,

Prasad.

Former Member

August 10, 2013 at 6:16 am

Many thanks Prasad !

Former Member

February 4, 2014 at 9:53 am

Hi Clint,

I think NLS is available only with 7.3 SP 9 & above and I have seen blogs about SAP planning to down porting NLS to BI 7.0, do you have any idea on this.

Thanks,

Shak.

Former Member

February 4, 2014 at 11:29 am

Hi Shak,

I personally am not to sure but maybe watch this video as we chat to SAP about the future vision.

Uddhav Gupta Don Brizendine do you perhaps have an update on backward compatibility on this for Shak ?

Thanks

Clint

Setting up BW Near-Line Storage with SAP Sybase IQ

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