In this issue of the SAP on IBM i SAP on IBM DB2 for i - News from Development Blog I would like to focus on performance improvements. In January a whitepaper called SAP on IBM i upgrade performance was released. You might have seen the announcement on the SAP on DB2 for i here in the SDN. But perhaps you just thought "Interesting, but I'm not about to upgrade, I'll read it when I plan an upgrade in the future." Well, you might want to think again. The improvements were made to improve upgrade performance but you can take advantage of them in other parts of system administration too. So I would like to give you a short overview:
On top of the R3trans improvement that was already covered in an SAP on DB2 for IBM i - speed up your imports, the white paper describes more developments that will also speed up typical administration and maintenance tasks while running an SAP system.
The following list shows the improvements and to which tasks they apply to. Please refer to the white paper for detailed information about each of the improvements and how to implement them.
- R3trans improvements for transport tasks:
- Parallel feature (white paper topic 'Modification Import'):
Starting with R3trans patch level 172 for Netweaver release 7.00, the R3trans comes with a new feature that allows parallel import of transport packages. This applies to Support Packages as well as to language imports and custom development transports. Besides the minimum R3trans patch level the feature requires a minimum Support Package level of SAP_BASIS 15 or SPAM/SAINT level 32. If these prerequisites are fulfilled, the feature can be activated within transaction STMS in the transport tool configuration of you transport domain controller by adding the ‘parallel’ parameter. All STMS initiated R3trans jobs will use this setting then.
To activate the feature for Support Packages and Add-On installations you need to have a minimum SPAM/SAINT level of 35. The feature is activated via menu Extras -> Settings via either SPAM or SAINT. We recommend a value of 8 for “Number of parallel processes per R3trans”.
- Database interface improvement (topic 'Shadow Import Phase SHADOW_IMPORT_INC'):
If you haven't patched your R3trans as described in the earlier blog entry "Speeding up Imports" we highly recommend doing so. The improvement is available for all Netweaver releases starting with 4.6C.
- Parallel feature (white paper topic 'Modification Import'):
- Database performance after system copy or codepage conversion (topic 'Database Optimizer Statistic Generation'):
The tool described in the white paper that helps to improve initial database response times after the upgrade also can be used to improve response times after a codepage conversion or system copy. When performing a database codepage conversion or a system copy with export/import method, database statistics are lost. The missing statistics cause initial slow response times until the database generated statistics on its own. The tool requests statistic generation from the database based on information collected on the pre converted or copy source system. For more details have a look into the white paper and SAP Note 1264859. - Runtime performance improvements (topic 'Archiving and reorganizing database tables'):
Archiving data and reorganizing database tables from time to time will have a positive impact on your system's response times. Both tasks together are reducing physical table sizes. Access to smaller tables is faster, online backup runtimes for the tables are shorter and moving archived data from hard disks to a tape library can save you costs.
- SAP Managed Tags:
