Few pitfalls to avoid during BEX workbook upgrade from 3.x to 7.x – Part 1

[former_member193715]

I am sure most of you have come across multiple issues during BEX workbook upgrade from 3.x to 7.x. Most of the customers use BEX workbooks pretty heavily. Some of the workbooks might have huge number of tabs. I have seen workbooks with 50+ tabs. Do you believe it? I am not kidding…

The BEX 7.x is based on .NET framework. A process can allocate a maximum of approximately 1.2 gigabytes (GB) in the .NET framework, regardless of the memory capacity in the front-end. This corresponds to approximately 750,000 data cells.

Following are some of the potential solutions, if you get the error “Client out of memory” in the upgraded workbook.

1. Avoid refreshing the whole workbook. Refresh the queries that you require by enabling the following features. The following features are available only from a certain support package level.
   1. Allow refresh of single queries as a global setting in BEX
   2. Single data provider refresh functionality
2. Split the workbook into multiple. It’s time to re-engineer and remove unwanted tabs.
3. Covert BEX workbook into to a new tool called SAP BO Analysis for Office. It's a bigger decision. If you have plans to move to this tool in future , this a good time to move forward. One of the main prerequisites is that you have to be on SAP BW 7.01 SP11 or higher.

(1)  Net..Net…Plan to upgrade the back-end and front-end patches to leverage the above-mentioned features so that you can avoid memory related errors in the upgraded workbook.

In the next part, I am going to talk about the missing features in BEX 7.x workbook compared to BEX 3.x workbook and provide alternate options to overcome the same.