Technology Blog Posts by SAP

Oracle Patchset 10.2.0.4 - neat DBMS_STATS enhancement

With release 11g Oracle made many feature enhancements to the database and some of them are now downported into the soon-to-be-released patchset 10.2.0.4.One new feature that I just found by 'accident' is the easy comparision of CBO statistics for ta...

SAP's BPM Approach: The Building Blocks of BPM Transformation - Part 2

After my SAP’s BPM Approach: The Building Blocks of BPM Transformation - Part 1 I now want to continue the discussion about the areas and elements (“Building Blocks”) we’ll have to consider and change to really start moving a company towards process ...

SAPs BPM Approach: The Building Blocks of BPM Transformation - Part 1

With this initial blog I want to start a discussion about the building blocks we identified for SAP’s roadmap towards a process oriented company. This blog is based on the experiences the Process Governance Team made when developing an approach to tr...

Managing Spreadmarts through SAP EPM

Thanks to Chris Pauxtis, who introduced me to this term, I thought this is worth a blog for all our BPXers. Another new (realized it is not new, existed from 2002, I got to know this now) term in the software world, but definitely a meaningful one. ...

'Mind the gap...' (#3 - Backup/Restore - Part 1)

In my mini-series "Mind the gap" I will try to shed some light on where the little or big differences between MaxDB and Oracle databases are and what to keep in mind when working with them.Today I take a look on how databases can be backed up and res...

Which Types of Tools you really need for Business Process Management (BPM)

If you look at the huge number of tools and suites that are offered across the marketplace to support the BPM activities of a company, it is really difficult to keep an overview. To reduce complexity you might have the idea to start reading all these...

Some basic qualities a good BPM Approache should meet!

If you look at the wide variety of existing methods that seem to be applicable for BPM, you’ll find different phase models, method collections, individual methods that fit to specific tasks or problems, and more or less comprehensive, integrated appr...

Questions to SAP Support: "Is my MaxDB recovery still running?"

Today a customer asked about how to monitor recovery activity on MaxDB.The typical questions here are: "Is it still running?" and "How long will it take?"While the last question cannot be answered easily (and mostoften not at all), since the time nec...

New Business Process Monitoring functionalities in SAP Solution Manager qRFC Monitoring

Further issues of this blogYou can find an introduction to Business Process Monitoring in SAP Solution Manager in the SAP Business Process Monitoring within SAP Solution Manager of this blog. There, all further blogs dealing with various aspects of B...

DB2 Best Practices Papers

Recently IBM published various best practices papers about DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows. Some of them are also of interest for everyone running SAP on DB2. One of the papers is outstanding as it answers a question which arises very often when ins...

Analytics vs Performance Management do you know the difference?

Analytics vs. Performance Management Like everyone does, I first approached the ‘Oxygen’ of virtual knowledge ‘Google’ for this term. Obviously it gave me link to google analytics. But on refining got this good definition of analytics that I could ...

SAP EPM extends solutions for Office of Chief Purchase Officers

With global sourcing options and competition, top management of many companies are looking at strategic benefits of purchasing and supply management. However the results have not been achieved as expected. Purchasing is no more get the supplies orga...

New Business Process Monitoring functionalities in SAP Solution Manager ALE / IDoc Monitoring

Introduction In this blog, we will report regularly on some of the new functionalities of Business Process Monitoring in SAP Solution Manager. We will cover the following topics, which are all part of the concept of Business Process Integration and A...

About Business Rules

After having disclosed BRFPlus in my first blog I want to take a look at business rules in general and give you some thoughts on the business rules idea, tools and trends.What are Business Rules?There are many definitions, for example, you may have a...

Find Your Way in the Great New World of SAP enhancement packages for SAP ERP: We Will Guide you

This blog is an invitation for you to SAP Enhancement Packages. This comunity project is run by SAP Business Suite and SAP Netweaver: thomas.weiss/blog is the co-author of this blog post.We want to motivate you to ask everything you want to know abou...

What you don't know about MaxDB...

Everyday I'm faced with collegues, customers, partners or SDN members asking questions about MaxDB.How can we setup an external backup tool? Why is my index not taken by the optimizer? Can I use MaxDB as a productive system?These question reveal that...

What you must know about implementing SAP enhancement packages for SAP ERP

Today I want to write about the implementation process of SAP enhancement packages for SAP ERP. As I already explained SAP changed the strategy to deliver new functionality: Instead of releases SAP now delivers SAP enhancement packages which are opt...

There's a rule for every exception

IntroductionIt's been really quiet around here so far this year as due to private affairs I was not able to blog as frequently as I did last year. However, to kick off a new blogging season I'd like to cover an ever-popular topic, which is also an al...

Some hints to make handling of oracle datablock corruptions more efficient

When faced with error messages like ORA-1578 Oracle database users just got the task to handle a database block corruption. I've already written about this topic before and today I'd like to share some tips and tricks to get this task done quicker.Hi...

DB2 Row Compression Revisited

Based on all the feedback which I received about DB2 9 I would say that row compression (now sometimes also called 'deep compression') is the feature which probably got the most attention. To compress table rows, DB2 replaces repeating patterns with ...

News from SAP NetWeaver Portal: Wikis Included in Product Offering

Web 2.0 concepts (such as web-based collaboration and community contributions within organizations) are being increasingly embraced by enterprises. Wikis are a key factor in these web 2.0 concepts. SAP will provide a wiki application - that is based ...

BRFplus a Business Rule Engine written in ABAP

Hello,my name is Carsten Ziegler and this is my first blog ever!You may ask yourself What it is about? What is the particular theme? Well we are in SDN so it must be something related to SAP.The topic of my blogging activities in SDN will be Business...

BusinessObjects and SAP Part 5

In case you missed the first parts of my blog series I have included the links to them here:BusinessObjects and SAP Part IBusinessObjects and SAP Part 2BusinessObjects and SAP Part 3BusinessObjects and SAP Part 4 In my previous blogs I did focus on h...

BusinessObjects and SAP Part 4

In case you missed the first parts of my blog series I have included the links to them here:BusinessObjects and SAP Part IBusinessObjects and SAP Part 2BusinessObjects and SAP Part 3 In my previous blogs I did focus on how Crystal Reports can leverag...

SDN Wiki Features - what features?

While editing content for MaxDB Wiki here in SDN I wondered how I might return to a older version of the page.Unlinke e.g. MediaWiki http://www.mediawiki.org/ the WIKI engine behind Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org) in the SDN Wiki there is no ta...

Not my fault - whose then?

I have written some lines about database corruptions and the ways to handle them in the past. The bottom line of everything I wrote (including support notes, SDN blogs and replies in customer messages) has always been:"The DBA is the one single respo...

BusinessObjects and SAP Part 3

In case you missed the first two parts of my blog series I have included the links to them here:BusinessObjects and SAP Part IBusinessObjects and SAP Part 2 In this blog I will explain how Crystal Reports is able to leverage hierarchies from a SAP BW...

Introducing SAP enhancement packages for SAP ERP

So this is the first time I'm writing a blog (and yes: I’m really excited!).Today I would like to give you some insight into SAP’s new release strategy and explain the differences between full-blown releases and SAP enhancement packages for SAP ERP. ...

How to take care of index corruptions in primary key indexes.

Primary key constraints in Oracle are enforced by using an index. The index does not need to be a unique index, but it has to be possible for the database to look into it and find out, if a given key is already present or not. This works fine, as lon...

Creating a Job Request with SAP Solution Manager

In this blog I present the Job Request, the starting point of any job management process. The diagram below illustrates a basic job management process. The requestor creates the job request in SAP Solution Manager. A service desk employee (together...

BusinessObjects and SAP Part 2

There seems to be huge interest in the BusinessObjects product suite. So, after the great feedback on my first blog I will try to complete my series on the BusinessObjects products in combination with SAP products more quickly. In this blog I will fo...

Point-in-time-recovery considered harmful

When I first got in contact to the possibility to bring back a database to the state it had, when a backup was taken I was not too much impressed.I though "Well, it's like any other backup - copy the saved file back to the place I found it." Getting ...

Debugging the MaxDB Kernel - How to get a Call stack the easy way

A few months ago, I described how to set up and configure the Windows Debugger in order to be able to generate a call stack for a hanging MaxDB thread.As this was technically interesting (at least I hope so), it is by far not the simplest way to get ...

Display Adapter Synchronous Message Content in RWB of PI 7.1

Introduction:In XI 3.0 and PI 7.0, in order to save storage, synchronous message content is never stored in the database. When we tried to display the message content, we will get the message: This makes debugging somewhat more difficult, since we c...

BusinessObjects and SAP Part I

I left beautiful Vancouver (it was not raining today) to go to Frankfurt for two weeks (the forecast was rain and snow). So I am sitting here in the Lufthansa plane writing my first in a series of blogs I am planning to write over the next couple of ...

Practical tips for developing with ABAP WebDynpro

So you've done the ABAP Webdynpro course, and you've maybe built a few simple webdynpros. Perhaps you now need to build something rather more complex, and what you learnt on the course doesn't seem to answer all your questions? Having recently been t...

'Mind the gap...' (#2 - Data storage)

More and more customers decide to use MaxDB and with that, the number of customers asking for a comprehensive list of differences or a comparison increases as well.In my mini-series "Mind the gap" I will try to shed some light on where the little or ...

Central Job Scheduling with SAP Solution Manager

Welcome to another edition of my blog on Job Scheduling Management with SAP Solution Manager. In this blog I demonstrate how to schedule a job from SAP Solution Manager (requires Support Package 15 or higher) in a remote system.Start the scheduling ...

Parameters. parameters, parameters ... the mantra of db performance troubleshooting

Database performance problems are one of the more complex tasks that brighten the day of a database software supporter.Each and every single day since I'm doing support for Oracle and MaxDB there had been messages, in which customers complained about...

Isn 't it Groovy - extending the Development Component build with Groovy?

Let's say we heard that something called "Groovy" just won the JAX innovation award 2007 and we want to use it. Note: SAP does not endorse Groovy or support usage. This is just an example for a popular technology and how to integrate it into the de...

Job Scheduling Management with SAP Solution Manager

Support Package 15 of SAP Solution Manager will help customers in realizing the Job Scheduling Management standard which is one of 16 SAP Standards for Solution Operation.Please visit our site on SAP Service Market Place http://service.sap.com/jsm. J...

Accelerated Business Process Enabling with Enterprise Services Bundles

Enabling business processes with pre-built enterprise services from SAP is easy. See how to discover an enterprise service bundle that fits end-to-end to an ATP check process with just a few mouse clicks. Now that you learned everything about servic...

Simplify DC structures for External Libraries

Adding an external library facet to a J2EE Server Component Library DC Starting with NW 7.0 SP13 the software component provided by SAP SAP_BUILDT (includes the main build plugins) is enhanced with a new Development Component with the name tc/bi/fct...

Blag's best blogs picks from 2007

This year is endind...We're soon going to start 2008 with a lot of nice news and surprises. I wanted to end this wonderful year with my humble list of best blogs...Not all categories are included, because I'm not an expert in every area...But I think...

Auto-generated Enterprise Service Test Stubs

IntroductionDuring the life-cycle of a Composite Application it may necessary to replace the consumed Enterprise Services (ES) with so called Test Stubs, which return a predefined set of data. Two of the most prominent use-cases for this are the foll...

Fragmentation in Oracle LMTS tablespace!

Recently two customers reported independent from each other that their LMTS/ASSM tablespace shows much “fragmentation”. What they meant was, that the repeatedly got errors like:ORA-1688: unable to extend table SAPWBP./BIC/B0000256000 partition /BIC/B...

'Mind the gap ...'

More and more customers decide to use MaxDB and with that, the number of customers asking for a comprehensive list of differences or a comparison increases as well.In my mini-series "Mind the gap" I will try to shed some light on where the little or ...

Chasing Oracle deadlocks part II - block level locks

After we had a look at the most straight forward occurrences of deadlocks (caused by row level locks), we will now have a look at a nastier problem: block level locks.Test caseSQL> select * from sapbut.ztesting;AAA BBB----- -------aaa ...

Dynamic User Interface Generation in Web Dynpro for Java - Use and Implementation

Hi, if you think "Dynamic UI Generation - what is so special about that? I've been using that for years", then this might be just the right blog for you as well as for those who are new in this area. Why? Because one focus point of this blog is to ex...

Testing BusinessGraphics in Web Dynpro for Java

Although there is a user interface element called "BusinessGraphic", one can not exactly describe such a graphic easily. As there are over 30 different BusinessGraphics and plenty of customizing options, it is possible to create a variety of graphics...