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As Daylight Saving Time is fast approaching, we wanted to make everyone aware of SAP BI Platform's readiness.

Daylight Saving Time starts in the United States on March 13 at 2am.  DST starts in most of Europe on March 27 at 1am.

SAP Development regularly tests all products and patches for Daylight Saving Time, but we in Support make a point of performing additional testing in all of the latest Support Packages as well.  This year, I extensively tested DST scenarios within the following:

  • SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise XI 3.1, Service Pack 7
  • SAP Business Intelligence Platform 4.1, Support Package 7
  • SAP Business Intelligence Platform 4.2, Support Package 01 (stay tuned for BI 4.2!)

Happily, there are no new issues to report!  The Daylight Saving Time switchover in 2016 should be no different than in any recent years.

Although these will not impact most customers, here are a few DST-related Knowledge Base Articles that are worth mentioning:

KBA 1404484 - Unix and Linux envioronments should have the $TZ variable correctly set to account for the date and time of the DST time changes in your region; both Spring and Autumn.  Non-US customers should especially be aware of this, because if the $TZ variable is not set then your system may default to honoring US DST rules.  If instance runtimes suddenly appear to be one hour earlier or later starting the day the US changes their clocks for DST, this is your issue!

KBA 1986781 - If an instance's runtime falls within the one-hour period skipped over by Daylight Saving Time, its runtime will automatically be adjusted by + one hour.  Recurring instances' runtimes are permanently adjusted, and should be re-scheduled if need be.  e.g. in the US, Spring DST immediately shifts the clock from 2am>3am.  If an instance runs on Sundays at 2:30am, starting the week of DST it will now run at 3:30am.  Only instances with a scheduled start time falling within this one-hour period are affected!

KBA 1448881 - This is a carryover from 5 years ago now.  Enterprise XI 3.1 had an issue where a recurring instance might suddenly spawn hundreds of failed instances per second, leading to thousands+ instances clusttering that object's history.  The solution was to re-schedule the affected instance, and a program object could be used to clean up the unwanted failed instances.  I only list this one because, whie the issue was fixed in XI 3.1 Fix Packs 3.6 / 4.1 and Service Pack 5, there have been very few reports of similar behavior in BI 4.x.  In the extremely rare case of this issue occurring in BI 4.x, it seems to be a less severe issue.  In any version, the solution -- described within this KBA -- remains the same.

If you encounter any other issues around Daylight Saving Time, please do let us know!

Thanks and regards

-Mike

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