SAP on IBM i – Update week 44: In-place Code Page Conversion on IBM i now supports the Combined Upgrade & Unicode Conversion, too
This is an update of the blog entry of June 9th, 2015 (KW 24).
The Combined Upgrade & Unicode Conversion procedure (SAP Note 928729 – Combined Upgrade & Unicode Conversion (CU&UC)) can reduce the total downtime of both operations by already performing some Unicode Conversion preparations in parallel to the upgrade. The subsequent Unicode Conversion will benefit from these preparations.
If your SAP system had been installed with a single Latin-1 code page, you can now reduce the downtime even more by performing the In-place CPC on IBM i procedure within the Unicode Conversion phase. SAP Note 800791 – IBM i: In-place Code Page Conversion ASCII to Unicode and the attached documentation of the In-place CPC on IBM i procedure (ASCII_Unicode_CPC.pdf, version 2.3 and higher) have been adjusted, so that the In-place CPC procedure can now be used together with the Combined Upgrade & Unicode Conversion. The CU&UC and the In-place CPC fit perfectly together to minimize your code page conversion downtime.
Of course, the In-place CPC on IBM i procedure still supports the normal Unicode Conversion (SAP Note 1051576 – Conversion of Single Code Page Systems to Unicode) as before.
Hi Ralf,
If some big transparent tables are listed for table splitting, will they also be exported by Inplace CPC? I understand only cluster tables and some transparent tables will be exported by this approach. Will Inplace CPC be able to ignore the transparent tables to be exported even though they are splitted by table splitting feature?
Dear Mr. Acharya, Transparent tables will not be exported during the In-place CPC process. In-place CPC will identify non-transparent tables and only these tables will be exported. Splitting non-tranparent tables is possible, but I will recommend you dont add transparent tables to the table split list to avoid unexpected results. Kind regards, Luis
HI Luis,
Thanks for your reply. The export has been completed successfully will only cluster and pool tables got exported.
Import is currently going on. However it seems SWPM has only 14 steps in Unicode Import option unlike standard conversion where multiple SAP related tasks/reports are integrated with SWPM.
Do we have to run all the reports and SAP tasks additionally after the import? Also in standard conversion, a new instance ASCS<NR> is created with SWPM but with inplace this step is not there.
Please suggest.
Hi Amit,
what is your release? if there is declustering/depooling involved in the "system copy" you can't use the inplace method yet. When only doing the codepage conversion no additional reports from SAPinst are needed.Because the inplace conversion only works on the database of an existing SAP system, no ASCS instance is created.
Regards,
Luis
Hi Luis,
Release is 740. Kernel release is 742. No there is no declustering/depooling selected during system copy which converts cluster table to transparent.
Import is successful as well.