Change Pointers

[Former Member]

Hi All

I have a scenario where we want to update a 3rd party system with some basic customer information (name, address, available credit etc). We require the systems to remain synchronised. I am investigating the possiblity of using a Change Documents/Change Pointer/IDoc solution to push the data from SAP (R/3 4.6c) when it changes, however, I have a few concerns around performance:

1. We don't currently have Change Pointers activated. My understanding is that even when globally activated (BD61) they still need to be assigned/activated for specific message types. Consequently, the additional overhead should be relatively light and shouldn't have much of an impact on system performance - is this assumption correct?

2. I understand that a job needs to be created to run RBDMIDOC in order to create the IDocs from the change pointers. Given that we want to capture a customer's changing credit exposure this will need to run at very short intervals by which I mean less than a minute. Again, does anybody think this is likely to have a significant performance impact.

3. Change pointers are designed for use with Master data not transactional data. To satisfy the credit exposure requirement I will need to set the Change Document flag against the data elements that hold details about credit exposure (eg tables S066 and S067). I expect these to change quite frequently as they will be updated by the sales order creation process. Again, can I expect significant impacts on performance.

I guess a lot of it will depend on volumes of data but I don't have this information to hand. I think our SAP installation is relatively small - we have approx. 3 million entries on KNA1 and 2 million on VBAK if that gives some indication.

I would appreciate any advice/pointers to further info. - or any suggestions for alternative solutions. We have an SAP XI installation but in this case the cost of licencing for real-time access to the SAP R/3 system is prohibitive.

Kind regards

Andy

[Former Member]

1) Correct, activating change pointers will not significantly impact your system - from what I've seen, activating the change log severely impacts system performance - this it totally different.

2) Yes, you need to run RBDMIDOC at regular intervals - i'm not sure if SAP scheduler allows <1 minute scheduling of jobs. We have our master data transfers going every 5 minutes between 2 SAP instances.

ALE is really pretty simple when you sit down and map it out 1 at a time.

We use XI to update several external systems incluing Active Directory.

[Former Member]

Thanks for you reply - our requirement has actually changed now so that licensing costs are less of an issue. We will therefore be using XI to retrieve the data.

Kind regards

Andy