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Is your SAP project – ‘livin on a prayer’?

Is your SAP project – ‘livin on a prayer’?

TAKE NOTE(Insights into SAP solutions and EmergingTechnology)

It’s a time of transition at SAP—with the recent turnover in the executive ranks and the cloud taking center stage—and that will be on display at Sapphire Now in Orlando, which is co-located with ASUG’s Annual Conference.

The event formally kicks off on June 3 (with the ASUG Pre-Conference Sessions starting the day before), and in an interview with ASUGNews, SAP CMO Jonathan Becher gives his preview of SAP’s largest North American conference.

The Theme

SAP has pushed the “SAP Cloud Powered by SAP HANA” branding recently, and Becher says that will be reinforced “everywhere you go” at Sapphire Now. He says attendees should expect some “directional announcements” that will shed more light on the where and when of SAP’s goal to move every application to the cloud.

Bill McDermott’s opening keynote on Tuesday morning, which is likely to be his first big public speech as sole CEO, will incorporate SAP cloud acquisitions Ariba and Fieldglass in talking about “the networked economy”: How business networks are coming together via machine-to-machine technologies, the Internet of Things and social networks, as well as the impact on how businesses will operate in the immediate future, Becher says.

And who will be replacing Vishal Sikka onstage Wednesday after Hasso Plattner’s time? Newly appointed SAP Executive Board member Bernd Leukert will fill the void with a little help from his friends.

Becher says Leukert will be joined onstage by many of his SAP colleagues throughout his keynote, and that appears to be a nod toward the recent departures of Sikka and head of cloud Shawn Price. Becher says SAP wants to show the “depth of its bench” and demonstrate that cloud and HANA are not an “exclusive provision of one person or one group.”

More Room for Connecting

Expect this year’s show floor to feature more space for attendees to meet and share stories with other SAP users. This includes expanding areas for informal networking in the “downtown area” and a new feature called the Customer Connect Center (CCC) that will offer a sort of matchmaking service for customers to meet without SAP.

“We’ve dramatically expanded pre-defined meeting areas,” says Becher.

At the CCC, there will be electronic sign-up sheets where customers can specify the topics they want to discuss. SAP will then match up customers of like interests for meetings with no SAP employees or press present at the table.

Customer stories won’t be limited to the show floor or in ASUG educational sessions. Becher says Thursday’s general session will feature SAP customers and partners on-stage sharing stories—in between appearances from Saturday Night Live veterans Dana Carvey, Kevin Nealon and Dennis Miller.

That atmosphere of customer connection is certainly augmented by the presence of the co-located ASUG Annual Conference. Becher sees the relationship between SAP and ASUG as a strategic one with the combined conference providing a good mix of the present and future for customers.

And the fact that SAP customers and ASUG members will be sharing all their SAP stories at the conference—both good and bad—is not lost on SAP.

Is your SAP project—as Sapphire Now’s Wednesday night entertainment Jon Bon Jovi might put it—“livin’ on a prayer?” Becher says SAP views even the advice that comes from “the bad” equally as important for attendees looking to make purchases: “Let’s be fair,” he says, “when people say everything is rosy, you say ‘Huh?’”

The combined event should ultimately provide the right mix of practical direction and future excitement for attendees. Says Becher: “You get a nice synergy of not just where to go but how to get there as well.”

This story, “Sapphire Now 2014 Aims to Show Off New SAP Structure, Connect Customers”  was originally published at ASUG News

 


 

UNDER DEVELOPMENT (Information for ABAP Developers)

Options for Determining Program Quality

You and I as ABAP developers understand that aside from design and code reviews, the most efficient technique for controlling program quality is during testing. By using the debugger, SQL Trace, and testing with real data, you can effectively monitor program performance, which of course, strongly depends on the dynamically executed code and the processed data.

I would like to continue the discussion from last month’s blog, focusing again on a preventive approach by using Static checks first to evaluate the quality of an object from its static definition. Good candidates for static checks include naming conventions, layout style guides, and other simple programming standards that are tightly associated with the static code. To some extent, you can also use static checks to look for the use of statements related to system stability and security.

Performance is NOT normally a problem on the development system, where adequate test data rarely exists, but it can quickly become one in the production system. Fortunately, you can make some assumptions about program performance based on static analysis. For example, by analyzing both the source code and the data dictionary definition, you can determine whether an Open SQL statement might become a performance bottleneck because of a badly coded WHERE clause, FOR ALL ENTRIES, or missing database index.

To perform static quality checks, you really need a tool for scanning a lot of source code and other object definitions efficiently. Starting back with SAP Web Application Server (Web AS) Release 6.10, we were given such a tool with the new SAP Code Inspector.

 


 

Q&A(Post your questions to Facebook or Twitter and get your Questions answered)

Q. I have a report program which has a performance issue. When the user runs the program online, it is taking more time to execute.

When I check the Runtime Analysis for the report, there are two select statements which are taking consuming the highest time in the report. For the Select statements are using For All Entries. Since the User doesn’t input any data and run the program for all the data, it has almost 15000 entries which is causing the “Select .. for all entries” to consume lot of time.

Please let me know if there is any work around for this issue.

Thanks in advance!!

A. OK, good question. Here are the steps I would take to solve this issue….

For the select statement which uses the FOR ALL ENTRIES clause, are you putting all the key fields in the condition? if not, add all the key fields, for all entries performance degrades if all the key fields are not mentioned on the condition.

Also, be sure to sort the table being used in the FOR ALL ENTRIES clause and remove duplicates. Sorting the table will improve performance and deleting dups will stop the DBMS from fetching the same data more than once, which is of course not necessary.

Also, and most importantly, please check whether the driver table(FOR ALL ENTRIES table) is empty or not. In the above scenario if the table in the FOR ALL ENTRIES clause is empty, you will effectively perform a tablespace scan, because the WHERE clause will be negated.

Alternatively, sometimes JOIN is better than FOR ALL ENTRIES. Check out this SCN posting for more info. JOINS vs. FOR ALL ENTRIES – Which Performs Better?

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