S/4HANA Finance: Steps to reduce memory footprint of obsolete tables

Thanks to SAP TechEd Session CAA114, “Paths for Transitioning to SAP S/4HANA”, I am now familiar with SAP Note 2190137​, “S/4HANA Finance: Reduce memory footprint of obsolete tables”. This note is mentioned to delete obsolete data after successful validation of the competed conversion. Before acting on this note, you should take all sorts of backups and precautions. So of course I am first going to try it on a sandbox system.

Start with transaction SA38 with program FINS_MIG_OBSOLETE_DB_DEL

According to the SAP Note, this will list all obsolete tables, number of records that can be deleted

Sample results are shown above.

Now in prepare phase, the “report will create copies of all tables in ABAP dictionary”

Logs shown after prepare step is done.

Copy data to shadow tables – “relevant data is copied from the original tables to corresponding shadow tables”.

This is the first job where the prompt to run it as a batch job appears

Review the results of the batch job:

It is all

Next step – Delete data in original tables

As the note states “all relevant data is deleted from the original tables”

Again, this should be run as a batch job

Review the logs of the records that are deleted.

After some time, the SAP Note recommends deleting the shadow tables.

You can see the shadow tables with the option “Show status and DB size”

Link to best practice is here

The feels like “cleaning house”, except in your SAP system.

Is this something you or your finance teams will remember to do once you are live/stable on S/4HANA?