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JanStallkamp
Employee
Employee
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This blog might be interesting for you if you are running SAP on IBM DB2 for i. If you have never heard about IBM i, perhaps you know the operating system and the integrated database under one of its former names like OS/400 or i5/OS. SAP and IBM formed a joint team to enable SAP's products to run on IBM i more than 10 years ago and nowadays this joint team is based at SAP's central location in Germany and in Rochester, Minnesota where IBM's development center for IBM i is located.

In the development and support team we see topics from time to time that might interest users of SAP on IBM i. Therefore we decided to start a blog series with news from the development team. We would like to present some background information, give some configuration advice and establish a direct contact between users and development.

In this first edition of the news from development blog I would like to give some ideas about how to find relevant information here in the SDN. If you have ideas about future topics feel free to make a comment to this blog. I have a list of future topics but if you have a special interest in some topic we may change the schedule.

Ok, now let's start with the question of "How do I find information useful for me as an SAP on IBM DB2 for i administrator"? The central web resource you should have bookmarked in your web browser is SAP on DB2 for i. This page is our central community home page from where a lot of resources are linked.

By the way... if you are wondering why we use DB4 as an alias for this web page, then you might look into this IBM DB2: 'Who is who' in the SAP environment. In short: DB4 is the ABAP name of DB2 for IBM i. If you want to know if you are running on DB2 for i you can check the value of sy-dbsys(3) in ABAP. If the value is DB4 you are fine. If it is something different you should think about migrating to this database 🙂

Back to our community home page: In the upper part of the page you will see up to four small features. Here we announce recent whitepapers, articles, redbooks, certifications, benchmark results and much more. Have a look!

On the right part of the page you see links to some of the SDN Expert Forums. I would like to highlight our SAP on IBM i forum. This is the place where you can discuss with a lot of experts. If you have not yet participated in this forum, feel free to join us. In the last two years this online community has grown a lot. There are a lot of users and consultants active in this forum and many of the developers (both IBM and SAP) are participating too. But I would like to remind everyone that this is a forum and not an official support channel. This means everyone is helping voluntarily and you cannot demand to get an answer to every question. Some issues can only be solved by SAP or IBM support using classical support channels. And it means that you should not only ask questions but also help others if you can. Beside the forums there are links to the wiki and some blog areas that might be interesting.

But what makes that community home page something that should be in your bookmark list is the lower part of the page. There you can see an area named SAP on DB2 for i5/OS Knowledge Center. It is basically a collection of useful resources inside and outside the SDN. In the section Books you will find links to redbooks by IBM. If you don't know them yet you should definitely have a look at  them. They are a great source of knowledge for system administrators. Then there is a section Key Topics. It looks kind of small and unimportant but behind the links you will find web pages focused on special topics of system administration. SAP on IBM i: Installation and SAP on IBM i: Upgrademainly present a quick access to the relevant SAP documentation and present some additional information. The page SAP on IBM DB2 for i: Selected Support Resources is a collection of links and SAP Notes provided by our support team. And then there is a link to the SAP on IBM DB2 for i: Database Interface page. You will find a SAP on i5/OS - Database Interface Notes there. If you are facing an issue with something related to the database you should have a look there. Thinking about using database hints? You will find the relevant SAP Notes on that page. Unsure about how to analyze a database error? Find some SAP Notes describing it there. Beside that SAP Note collection we have made a SAP on DB2 for i5/OS - Profile Parameters that are special for running SAP on IBM DB2 for i.

If you look at the above mentioned lists of SAP Notes you will see that many of them start with the term iSeries in their title. And the older ones often start with AS/400. When searching for SAP Notes you should be aware that the titles of SAP Notes are not updated when the database, operating system or server names are renamed by IBM. So using a very new name for searching might not give you all relevant results. And as the recent name IBM i (and the last one System i) are not very search engine friendly many of the new IBM i specific SAP Notes still get an "iSeries" in their title.

Feel free to give feedback to this first issue of the news from development blog either here or in the SAP on IBM i forum.