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Oracle SAP

for
T E C H N O L O G Y U P D A T E

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N E W
Oracle Index Compression for SAP Customers
D A T A B A S E 11

No. 18 Oracle for SAP, May 2009

www.oracle.com/sap
 Oracle database for SAP
is safe, reliable and scalable
– the Grid enabled platform

D A T A B A S E 11g
CONTENTS

3 Editorial
4 Oracle 11g outlook and 10g supported features for SAP
10 Manageability of VLDB, Oracle Index Comression
24 Oracle 10g RAC for SAP at NSW Fire Brigades
26 Oracle 10g RAC for SAP at Kuwait Oil, Q8
28 Oracle RAC for SAP at National Gas Company of Trinidad and Tobago
31 Certified SAP on RAC Configurations for Windows and Linux
32 Oracle 10g RAC for SAP at Gottwald Port Technology GmbH
36 Oracle 10g RAC for SAP at German Telekom, “Computerwoche”
38 Oracle 10g RAC for SAP at Indian Express
42 Oracle 10g RAC for SAP at ASE Taiwan
46 Oracle 10g RAC for SAP at Diehl Informatik

48 Oracle Index Key Compression at Bauerfeind

52 Oracle Table Compression at CAPCOM, Japan
56 SGI and SAP on Oracle database at MTU
60 Oracle 10g for SAP at Chevron

64 All4IT France, SAP on Oracle database Consulting

65 Delta Consulting
66 IOUG SAP Special Interest Group (SAP SIG)
67 SAP Press: SAP Database administration with Oracle
68 Advanced Customer Services for SAP customers
73 IS4IT, SAP on RAC Implementation Partner
74 Useful links Oracle database for SAP customers
76 Imprint
 Oracle Database for SAP – The #1 Database safe, reliable, scalable, optimized for SAP customers 3

DEAR SAP CUSTOMER,

Oracle Corporation and SAP AG have an ongoing commitment to our joint customers and have long-standing
reseller and customer support agreements in place, which provide enhanced access to Oracle database
technology and improved customer support.

For 20 years Oracle has been the safe, reliable, and scalable database of choice for SAP customers.
The Oracle database is constantly optimized for SAP applications and around the world more than two
thirds of all mid-size to high-end SAP customers in every industry, entrust their application deployments
to Oracle databases. Customers are running SAP applications with Oracle databases on all major
operating systems.

In this edition, we focus on the most important technologies that uniquely benefit SAP on Oracle database
customers. Only the Oracle database provides SAP customers the following advantages:

Best Performance & Scalability, Superior Locking & Concurrency, Real Application Clusters (RAC)
Oracle has world record SAP SD benchmark results, with exceptional scaling across SMP and Cluster environments.
Multi-version Read Consistency means that readers don’t block writers and writers don’t block readers, a key component for the highest
possible database performance. Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) provides a flexible way to achieve near linear scalability of SAP
applications. Now with RAC, customers have a choice to either scale up or scale out the database server layer. Since all RAC nodes are
active, it helps SAP customers to meet the demands of production workload requirements. Widely adopted by customers, Oracle RAC is
the only generally available clustered database solution certified for all SAP products.

Best Deployment Flexibility

Widest range of supported platforms; Unix – Linux – Windows – “Oracle is Oracle is Oracle”. The same code base across all operating
systems means, Oracle has the same features, tools and functionality on all hardware platforms and operating systems, so our customers
can choose the most cost effective platform for their implementations. Should customers require a change in operating systems, Oracle
offers fast and efficient Oracle-to-Oracle (O2O) migration services. An automatic “Fast Start” install of Oracle database technology for
SAP Business All-in-One is currently implemented with Hewlett Packard for all major platforms.

Best Availability & Reliability, Real Application Clusters (RAC), Data Guard (DG)
RAC for SAP removes the database server as a single point of failure and delivers enhanced performance & scalability adopted across
platforms by many customers in various industries. Oracle Data Guard (DG) complements Oracle RAC and Flashback technologies as the
preferred disaster recovery solution it’s used by SAP customers around the world. Together RAC and Data Guard ensure your SAP data
will be safe from hardware failures and data center disasters.

Best Support for Very Large Databases

The Oracle database is well known for providing the most efficient use of disk space. This is extremely important to SAP customers as the
size of their databases continue to grow dramatically. Unicode is now required by new SAP products and Unicode migrations require a
complete unload and load of data. Oracle optimizations result in the fastest SAP Unicode Migrations, with up to 1 terabyte/hour data transfer
rates and it’s fully integrated in SAP products. Even the largest multi terabyte databases have been migrated in one weekend. SAP customers
using Oracle databases also take advantage of Index Key Compression to save disk space at no additional costs. Huge and increasing
amounts of data continue to stress system performance, Oracle offers a rich collection of partitioning strategies to reduce I/O and improve
performance. Hewlett Packard Oracle Exadata Storage Server deployment under SAP will be evaluated after the official shipment of Oracle
11g Release 2 by SAP.

Best Database Security

Compliance and security are more important now than ever before. Oracle’s Advanced Security Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) makes
encryption of sensitive data simple by transparently encrypting data when it is written to disk. Oracle database Vault helps customers
meet regulatory compliance requirements by enforcing separation of duties (please see Edition 17).

Best Database Manageability & Self-Management for SAP

SAP DBA Cockpit, SAP BR*Tools for Oracle uses the Oracle Automatic Workload Repository (AWR). AWR automatically stores workload
and performance statistics so administrators and support engineers can analyze and quickly resolve performance issues, whether the
root cause happened hours or days before.

In this edition, you will learn more about these features and selected customer success stories. Please see also more about the Oracle
Advanced Customer Services (ACS) for SAP customers, including: database migrations, performance tuning, health check and internal
training work shops. For more information or to see current and previous editions go to: www.oracle.com/sap. We welcome your com-
ments and questions, please contact us at: saponoracle_de@oracle.com

Sincerely

Gerhard Kuppler
Senior Director Corporate SAP Account,
Oracle Corporation
4
O U T L O O K O R A C L E D ATA B A S E 1 1 g
FOR SAP CUSTOMERS
Oracle database Release 11g is currently being tested
by SAP.
As with previous certifications, SAP will certify Oracle
database 11g Release 2 with their products. There are
features of Oracle 11g which will greatly benefit SAP
customers. Below you find a list of features which are
currently planned by SAP to be used once 11g gets
certified by SAP or shortly thereafter:
• Secure Files
Secure Files implement a new architecture for
storing unstructured data and will replace the LOB
datatypes of previous database versions. Secure Files
deliver improved performance and scalability over
LOBs and offers reduplicaton functionality to save
disk space.
• Optimizer Enhancements and Statistics Maintenance
The 11g Optimizer provides performance enhance-
ments for complex SAP BI queries and better
recognizes value changes in R /3 sql statements.
Statistics maintenance especially for partitioned
objects is improved and calculation of statistics
is more accurate and faster compared to previous
database versions.
• Automatic Interval Partitioning
Maintenance of partitioned objects is now fully
automatic as the database server will manage parti-
tions on the fly.
• OLTP Table Compression
As part of the Advanced Compressed Option table,
data may be compressed reducing disk space and
improving query performance. In combination
with index key compression and Secure File com-
pression every type of data in the Oracle database
can be stored in a compressed way.
• Secure File Compression
In addition to relational table data, unstructured
data may also be compressed in the Oracle database.
Secure File compression is part of the Advanced
Compression Option. Oracle 11g is the only
database which is able to compress every type of
data used by SAP named tables, indexes and
unstructured data stored in Secure Files.
• Online Patching
This unique and patented technology of Oracle
allows single and bundle patches to be applied
while the database is running reducing downtimes
dramatically. Online Patching is available for
Single Instance and RAC installations, even with
shared Oracle Homes required by SAP.
• Dictionary Only Add Column
Within the SAP application new columns may have
to be added. Prior to 11g, an add column activity
would rquire significant and time intensive update
statements to be generated for each row of the table.
With Oracle 11g this is not the case anymore.
The data for the new column is only populated if
the row is accessed by the application. So any add
column from the SAP application will be executed
within seconds and not minutes or hours that are
required prior to Oracle 11g.
 Oracle 11g outlook and 10g supported features for SAP 5

g
11
• No Segment Allocation for empty Objects
Before Oracle 11g an initial extent was always allo- D A T A B A S E
cated for each object (index, table, partition) even
if the object did not contain any data. With Oracle
11g an extent is allocated if data is being inserted
into the object. Empty objects will not have any
extent allocated. This is very beneficial for a SAP
installation as many objects are empty after the
installation. This feature will make the SAP instal-
lation faster and reduce substantially the initial
disk space requirements.
• Direct NFS
Oracle 11g includes functionality to directly mount
NFS filesystems from certified NAS systems into
the database kernel. Through this optimization
the traditional overhead of NFS clients is avoided
delivering better throughput of the Oracle database
on certified NAS systems.
• Tablespace Encryption
Included within the Advanced Security Option is
the technology to encrypt all data in a tablespace.
Especially for SAP systems it is now very easy to
encrypt sensitive data.
 6
U P D AT E O N O R A C L E D ATA B A S E F U N C T I O N A L I T Y W I T H
SAP PRODUCTS
g
10
D AT A B A S E INTRODUCTION
Oracle database 10g is the first database designed for
Enterprise Grid Computing to lower hardware costs
by leveraging low cost components and by greatly
increasing resource utilization levels, therefore com-
plementing the Advanced Computing Infrastructure
concept of SAP. Oracle database 10g Release 2 is avai-
lable to SAP customers and it is being adopted rapidly
by SAP customers. Oracle 10g RAC is general available
as of January 2009 on all platforms for SAP versions
4.6C moving forward.
The following provides a list of important features
available to SAP customers today.
Multiple Oracle Patch (MOPatch) Utility
The Maintenance of single patches for databases on
Unix and Linux platforms can be a time-consuming
and complex job when dealing with many SAP
installations. Also the experience from many support
calls especially in the area of database performance
shows that many databases are not always at a recom-
mended patch level. To help database administrators
in these areas a new patch utility MOPatch was deve-
loped to guarentee that an Oracle database for the
SAP application always uses the most current set of
patches certified by SAP. SAP note 1027012 provi-
des more details on how to use MOPatch.
ROWID Splitting
An SAP Unicode Migration requires a complete export
and import of the whole database through R3load.
Typically the time for doing an export or import is
dominated by a few single large tables like RFBLG,
COEP or GLPCA as these table are substantially
bigger than any other table in the database. To reduce
the export and import times is possible to break
these tables into smaller portions and have one
R3load job work per table portion. Without ROWID
splitting is very time consuming and resource inten-
sive to calculate the ranges for each portion.
Calculation of a start and end point for the WHERE
clause of each table portion is very expensive as you
need to scan either the whole table or to scan a com-
plete index. The R3load export using the WHERE
clause with column values again is very expensive
as you need to access both index and table data.
The unique rowid splitting technology of Oracle
avoids any index access and generates rowid ranges
so that data can be physically read from disk. Rowid
splitting provides two important advantages. First,
ranges can be calculated in a few seconds by using
the physical structure information of the table stored
in the Oracle Data Dictionary compared to minutes
or hours using WHERE clauses on columns. Second,
the actual R3load export is dramatically faster as it
reads data in physical order from disk and not using
an index. Customer experiences show that R3load
exports using rowid ranges are between 10-20 times
faster using less CPU, memory and IO resources.
A Unicode migration using rowid splitting has
achived export and import rates up to data per hour.
Index Key Compression
This feature allows B*Tree Indexes to be stored more
efficiently on disk and in main memory reducing
disk space and improving query performance. Up to
70% of space for indexes can be saved on disk and
query performance may improve by up to 30%.
SAP Note 1109743 provides more details on how the
index compression feature should be used in SAP
environments.
Instant Client
Instant Client allows you to run your applications
without installing the standard Oracle client or
having an ORACLE_HOME. OCI-based applications
like SAP work without modification, while using
significantly less disk space than before.
With the release of new SAP kernels 4.6D_EX2 and
6.40_EX2 the Instant Client is now available to all
SAP versions starting from 4.6C on. Please refer to
SAP Notes 1086956 and 1058988 for more details.
 Oracle 11g outlook and 10g supported features for SAP 7

Advanced Security Network Encryption Change-Aware

CONCLUSIONIncremental Backup
Oracle Advanced Security Network Encryption pro- ByOracle
using 10g
a new Database
type of provides
log file tothe
track
necessary
blocksinfra-
that
vides an easy-to-deploy and comprehensive solution have
structure
changed forinmaking
the database,
the SAP RMAN
landscape
avoids
more
scanning
respon-
for protecting bidirectional communication to and thesive
entire
to the
datafile
changing
during
business
an incremental
environment.backup.
Oracle 10g
from the Oracle database using both standards based Instead,
Database
the gives
amount youofthe
data
flexibility
scanned you
is proportional
need to imple-
network encryption, and robust native encryption/- to ment
the amount
Enterpriseof data
Grid changed.
Computing, even using low
integrity algorithms. cost servers and disks. The design of Enterprise Grid
Network Encryption between ABAP and Java Computing
Flashback complements the Adaptive Computing
Database
Application Servers and the Oracle database is Infrastructure
The Flashback Databaseconceptsfeature
of SAP.provides
Oracle 10g
a wayDatabase
to
available for all SAP products based on NW2004s. provides the benefit of lowering risks
quickly revert the entire Oracle database to the with lower
state
it manageability
was in at a pastcosts,
point greater
in time.scalability andbring
Also possible predicta-
Advanced Security Transparent Data Encryption bility table
a single and the backhighest levels
in time. SAPof Note
availability.
1125923
(TDE) provides more detail on the usage of this feature in
Makes encryption of sensitive data simple by trans- SAP environments.
parently encrypting data when it is written to disk.
Data Pump Export and Import Utilities
Rename Tablespace The Data Pump Export and Import utilities provide
You can now rename a tablespace. You no longer very high-speed bulk movement of data and meta-
have to create a new tablespace, copy the contents data from one database to another. These utilities offer
from the old tablespace, and drop the old tablespace. several significant advantages over the original Export
This feature makes it easier, for example, to convert a and Import utilities, including: The ability to com-
dictionary-managed tablespace to a locally managed pletely restart export and import jobs; the ability to
tablespace, or to add a tablespace to a database that detach from and reattach to long-running jobs; the
already contains a tablespace with the same name, ability to estimate how much space an export job
an operation being used in a MCOD environment. would consume; support for export and import ope-
rations over the network; and support for fine-grained
Online Segment Shrink object selection, based upon objects and objects types.
This feature shrinks segments of tables and indexes This feature will initially not be integrated within
online and in-place that have free space, thereby the SAP administration tools.
enhancing efficiency of space utilization. The new Data Pump Export and Import utilities can
each be run in parallel, resulting in better performance
End-to-End Application Tracing in loading and unloading data and metadata.
The feature simplifies the debugging of performance
Cross-Platform Transportable Tablespaces
problems in multi-tier environments. It will only be
available for new versions of the SAP software and The transportable tablespace feature now enables
not for existing versions. tablespaces to be transported across different plat-
forms, therefore, making a platform migration for
Online LONG to LOB Migration
a SAP customer much faster.
In this release tables with LONG and LONG RAW Full Database Begin Backup Command
data, still used by many SAP applications, can now
be migrated online to LOB data from within the It is no longer necessary to issue a separate command
BR*SPACE utility of SAP. to place each tablespace in hot backup mode. You can
now use the ALTER DATABASE statement to place
Automatic Optimizer Statistics Collection
all tablespaces in backup mode. Also, the BEGIN
BACKUP command now runs faster than before.
This feature automates the collection of optimizer
statistics for objects. Objects with stale or no statistics
are automatically analyzed, so administrators no longer
need to keep track of what does and what does not
need to be analyzed, nor to perform analysis manually.
 8

NEW FUNCTIONALITY ORACLE 10g REAL

WITH SAP BI 7.0 A P P L I C AT I O N C L U S T E R S
g
10
D AT A B A S E
SAP BW users will benefit most from the new
features described in this section. These features are
(RAC)

Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) allows Oracle

immediately available to all SAP BI customers. Database to run any packaged or custom application,
unchanged across a set of clustered servers. This
Faster Drop and Truncate Table provides the highest levels of availability and the
These two operations perform substantially faster by most flexible scalability. To keep costs low, even the
using improved algorithms in accessing the database highest end systems can be built out of standardized,
buffer cache. In particular small tables, often used by commodity parts. Oracle 10g RAC provides a foun-
SAP BW, benefit the most. dation for Oracle’s Enterprise Grid Computing
Architecture.
IN MEMORY UNDO Oracle RAC technology enables a low-cost hardware
platform to deliver the highest quality of service that
Block changes by short transactions are now managed
rivals and exceeds the levels of availability and scala-
better by the database server resulting in less CPU
bility achieved by the most expensive, mainframe
cycles.
SMP computers. Oracle 10g RAC is available on all
platforms for SAP versions 4.6C and subsequent
Improved Scalability for Partitioned Objects
versions.
Dropping partitioned tables and indexes is now
substantially faster by using a new algorithm for Integrated Clusterware
identifying the blocks of a partitioned object in the
Oracle 10g RAC offers a complete clusterware manage-
buffer cache and for cleaning these blocks in the
ment solution as an integral component of Oracle
buffer cache. The SAP BW application benefits the
10g RAC available on all platforms Oracle 10g
most, as dropping partitioned objects is a frequently
Database runs on. This clusterware functionality
used operation in SAP BW.
includes mechanisms for cluster connectivity, messa-
Tests performed using a query on a table with 1,000
ging and locking, cluster control and recovery, and a
partitions show that Oracle 10g’s new strategy of
services provisioning framework. No 3rd party clu-
sharing partitioning metadata results in less SQL
sterware management software need to be purchased.
memory usage in the SGA (9.2.0.6: 52KB, 10.2:
Oracle will, however, continue to support select 3rd
11KB – this means that every single query on this
party clusterware products on specified platforms.
table will use 5 times less memory).
With Oracle 10g Database Release 2, Oracle provides
a High Availability API so that non-Oracle processes
ODM Connector 2.1
can be put under the control of the high availability
Oracle Data Mining Connector 2.1 leverages all framework within Oracle Clusterware.
advanced Data Mining algorithms from Oracle data-
base 10g Data Mining Option. Oracle Data Mining
Connector 2.1 is fully integrated with the Analysis
Process Designer providing a secure, scalable and
indatabase analytics engine for both BW 3.5 and
BI 7.0 customers.

SAPCTL
Oracle Clusterware does provide high availability
for SAP resources just as it does for Oracle resources.
Oracle has created an Oracle Clusterware tool, SAP
Control (SAPCTL), to enable you to easily manage
SAP high availability resources. SAPCTL provides
an easy-to-use interface to administer the resources,
scripts, and dependencies of Oracle Clusterware
and SAP high availability components. SAPCTL
consolidates the functionality of the Oracle command-
line tools by enabling you to easily manage the SAP
Enqueue Service for ABAP and JAVA, the SAP
Replication Service for ABAP and JAVA, and the
additional virtual IP addresses used by the SAP
Enqueue Service for ABAP and/or JAVA. In Addition
the message server and the dialog instance are covered
by SAPCTL.
With the introduction of SAPCTL, no 3rd party
software is needed to manage and control the critical
SAP services, from 6.40 based systems of SAP and
upwards (as of today, available only for Linux and
AIX).
Additional Support for EMC Celerra NFS Servers
In addition to the already SAP certified NetApp
NFS servers for SAP/RAC deployments on Linux
platforms now SAP customers can use EMC NAS
Celerra systems using NFS.
Single System Image Management
Oracle 10g Enterprise Manager has been significantly
enhanced to enable true single system image manage-
ment of cluster database deployments. Enterprise
Manager’s Cluster Database Page provides a single
view of system status across multiple nodes. It also
enables direct drill down to individual instances
when needed.
A new cluster configuration verification tool and
improvements in the diagnostic tools first introduced
in the Oracle9i database release help users both
avoid problems and resolve problems more quickly
should they occur.
Oracle 11g outlook and 10g supported features for SAP 9
Data Guard Integration for Disaster Recovery
With Oracle 10g Enterprise Manager, the manage-
ment component of Oracle Data Guard, Data Guard
Broker, is now completely integrated with RAC.
Data Guard disaster recovery environments involving
Oracle RAC databases can now be as easily managed
as those employing single instance databases.
F E AT U R E S T O B E
RELEASED SOON BY SAP
Database Vault
Database Vault provides strong internal controls for
regulatory compliance and protection against insider
threats. By implementing Database Vault a DBA is
no longer able to view user data.
Database Vault will be available to all SAP customers
in the second half of 2009 with 10.2.0.4 running
700 kernel based applications of SAP such as ECC
6.0 or BI 7.0.
CONCLUSION
Oracle database 10g provides the necessary infrastruc-
ture for making the SAP landscape more responsive
to the changing business environment. Oracle data-
base 10g gives you the flexibility needed to implement
Enterprise Grid Computing, even using low cost
servers and disks. The design of Enterprise Grid
Computing complements the Adaptive Computing
Infrastructure concepts of SAP. Oracle database 10g
provides the benefit of lowering risks with lower
manageability costs, greater scalability and predicta-
bility and the highest levels of availability.
10
M A N A G E A B I L I T Y O F V E RY L A R G E D ATA B A S E S
– Oracle Index Compression, SAP Partioning Engine, Backup Technologies
INTRODUCTION
Not too long ago, a phrase that could be heard and
read frequently went like this: Only the top 10
databases worldwide have a size of one Terabyte or
more. True, a few scientists published papers in
journals such as the Proceedings of the International
Conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB), and every
now and then an article about Taming the Beasts
appeared in the Internet, but almost nobody had
ever seen giants and monsters in real life, so all this
was supposed to be only a fairy tale.
Today, the world is full of giants and monsters. In the
SAP world, a one Terabyte (1 TB) database is almost
considered low end, with high-end customers currently
managing 20 to 50 TB databases, and some of them
expecting to reach the 100 TB range in the very near
future.
Recent developments also quashed the firm conviction
that Decision Support (DSS) databases are always
considerably larger than OLTP databases. The silent
assumption was that in the unlikely event of one of
your databases becoming a very large one, it would
necessarily – and could only – be the DSS database.
And the obvious conclusion seemed to be that only
designers of DSS systems needed to worry about
technologies that can help handle large amounts of
data, whereas for OLTP systems there is no problem
at all.
Today, customers in many industries (e. g. Retail,
Utilities) find that the database size of their SAP ERP
systems is equal to or even greater than the database
size of their SAP BI systems. And they also find that
their ERP systems are not as well prepared for hand-
ling large amounts of data as their BI systems.
All this means that many SAP customers today face
two closely related problems. The first problem is a
general one: databases are growing faster than ever
before and there is an urgent need for technologies
and tools that help customers “taming the beasts.”
The second problem is a special one: the possible threat
of large amounts of data was more or less neglected
by many designers of ERP systems, so the “beasts”
tend to behave nastier in these environments. In other
words: The monsters became real, and the nightmares
of database administrators became true.
Or did they?
G E N E R A L C O N S I D E R AT I O N S
Reasons for Database Growth
Why do databases grow that much and that fast?
The question seems to be trivial. Everybody is familiar
with the main reasons:
• More and more detailed information is stored in
OLTP systems. Retailers literally follow every
single bottle of beer, transportation companies
trace the way of every single parcel. Web-based
commerce requires that all details of a transaction
are stored in the database.
• Another reason of database growth is consolidation.
Previously independent, local or departmental sys-
tems are consolidated in order to create a global
system as one single source of truth. Many companies
also acquire other companies and need to consolidate
old and new systems.
• Regulatory requirements force companies to keep
historical data in the database for many months or
even years.
• Customers need to store more and more unstructured
data such as emails or PDF files.
Nevertheless, it is important to ask the question
“Why is my database growing that much?”, because
in most cases the answer already implies a hint at
possible solutions. If, e. g., it turns out that the
amount of historical data is the main reason,
database administrators should look for strategies
about how to minimize the impact of historical data

on daily operations. If, however, the main reason is
the acquisition of other companies, it can be helpful
to look for logical separation of the previously inde-
pendent data even in the consolidated database.
Pain Points
If a database becomes a large database, which in turn
becomes a very large database, most companies will
at some point in time begin to struggle with at least
these three issues:
• An obvious issue is the increasing cost for disk
space and other hardware components. Sure, disk
space becomes cheaper and cheaper. But in the
SAP world a productive database comes with a
development and a test system, a high availability
solution and the need for backup media. So for
many customers a nominal database growth of 1
Terabyte actually means that 8 or 10 Terabytes
additional disk space are needed. Moreover, it may
be necessary to add memory and CPU power to the
database server machine.
• The combination of an increasing amount of data
and increasingly complex applications will probably
lead to performance degradations.
• Finally, database administrators will be confronted
with what has been called the “manageability
paradox”: A growing amount of data should result
in longer maintenance windows. The reality,
however, is that maintenance windows are shrinking
due to increasing availability requirements for
globally used systems.
In this article we will focus on the manageability
aspect. This does not mean that the TCO and perfor-
mance aspects will not be mentioned at all. A feature
or a strategy that helps shrink maintenance windows
often also reduces cost and improves performance.
However, the people we have in mind here are data-
base administrators and their questions about how to
deal with the manageability paradox.
We will also focus on Oracle database technologies.
It is clear that this aspect cannot be completely isola-
ted from other aspects (e. g. application or storage
design). But it is useful nevertheless to ask, which
Oracle technologies can help administrators deal with
today’s databases.
Oracle Index Compression for SAP Customers 11
General Strategies
Before we look into individual technologies, it may
be helpful to discuss the general ideas about how to
handle database growth, i.e. the principles that govern
the selection of technologies.
The most common approach can be summarized in
three words: Buy more Hardware. Despite all com-
plaints about increasing cost, this is still the preferred
approach, because it is (or seems to be) simple: No
application or database redesign is required. It’s just
a matter of adding a few hardware components of a
familiar type.
Within certain limits, nothing is wrong with this
approach. A database needs disk space, and a data-
base server needs memory and CPUs. However, this
approach can be dangerous, if it is the only one, i.e.
if only the hardware layer is considered. If your
database is heavily fragmented or if your application
scans too much data in order to find a few simple
results, you can throw a lot of money at the problem,
but you will see only very limited improvements.
The second approach relies on the idea that it should
be beneficial to Shrink the Database. This approach
comes in two main flavors. One of them is Archiving.
Periodically, historical data (i.e. data accessed rarely
or not at all) are moved from the database to an
archive. This operation frees up database disk space,
makes sure that the period of time covered by the data-
base remains constant, and thus slows down database
growth. The second approach is Compression. Its
basic idea is to reduce the database size by storing at
least part of the data in a more compact format.
These strategies are certainly helpful, but they have
their dark sides too. Not much needs to be said here
about archiving, as in the SAP world the algorithms
and tools are provided by SAP. However, there are
some limitations, in particular legal ones. Most com-
panies cannot decide themselves, when they would
like to archive data, but have to comply with regula-
tory requirements. And there are side effects, which
need to be (and will be) discussed in the Oracle
Technologies section. The most prominent and
dangerous one is database fragmentation due to data
archiving.
12
The same is true for compression. Oracle is proud to
offer the most comprehensive set of compression
features. If, however, other database vendors want to
make people believe that compression is the one and
only thing that can be done about growing databases,
that simply compressing the whole database is a
sophisticated space management strategy, and that, if
you just keep squeezing the giants, somehow – who
knows? – they might become small, we need to say:
Stop Dreaming! Compression has a price. If applied
appropriately, it comes with a small performance
overhead; if you apply it inappropriately, it will let
you know via a real performance penalty.
Furthermore, compression does not stop database
growth, it only slows it down. The problem will be
right back after 2 or 3 years, and that time it will be
worse, if the compression mythology prevented you
from looking for additional strategies.
These additional strategies can be summarized in the
famous words: Divide and Conquer. The crucial
factor is that you stop thinking about the entities
you manage as simple and indivisible units. Instead,
you should look for, implement and use logical
structures. A database, a table, an index – and even
an application – are not indivisible blocks. Either
they already provide internal structures, if only you
look carefully, or at least they provide the opportunity
to implement a structure. The benefit of such a struc-
ture is that it gives you smaller pieces which can be
handled independently. Should you compress a data-
base (a table, an index) or rather leave it uncompressed?
Should you store your data on cheaper or more ex-
pensive disks? Should you backup your data every day?
– The common characteristic of all these (and many
more) questions is that there cannot be a convincing
answer, because the question itself is flawed.
Most probably you get better answers by asking que-
stions like: Which part of the database (the table, the
index) should be compressed? Which part of the data
can be stored on cheaper disks or should be stored on
more expensive disks? Which part of my database
should be backed up every day?
The point at stake is particularly clear in the case of a
database that became a very large one as the result of
a consolidation project (see Figure 1). When isolated
information islands are consolidated and when a global
database is created, the main benefit for the users, in
particular for the management of the company, is:
because there is one single source of truth, the system
can provide meaningful answers to important questi-
ons. Database administrators, of course, will imme-
diately find that there is also a downside, which
we already mentioned: the manageability paradox.
However, it is easy to see that the giant is a threat,
that the database size is a challenge for administra-
tors only as long as the successful consolidation is the
final step of the project and that “single source of
truth” also means “single, unstructured and indivisible
block”. The manageability paradox disappears, if the
database is structured, thus establishing virtual units,
which can be managed separately and independently.
For this goal, it does not matter at all, whether the
virtual structure is the same as the previous physical
structure or a completely new one.
Structuring the database is the mother of all weapons
against explosive database growth, the manageability
paradox and administrators nightmares. However, by
structuring the database we do not mean that physical
database pieces should be created. We do not talk
about shared-nothing architectures. We talk about the
implementation of a virtual structure, or even a com-
bination of several virtual structures within a database
that remains undivided. Structuring the database is
not a technology or a feature, but a concept, which in
turn is the basis of several technologies and features
provided by the Oracle database. The most prominent
one is probably table and index partitioning. That is
why we will start our discussion of Oracle technologies
that help handle very large databases with this feature.
Figure 1 E V O L U T I O N O F A D ATA B A S E
1. Uncoordinated local databases
2. Unstructured consolidated
database
3. Structured consolidated
database

TABLE AND INDEX
PA RT I T I O N I N G
Partitioning – How Does it Work?
The basic idea of partitioning is very simple:
group rows of a “table” based on the value(s) in one
(or more) column(s) and store the distinct groups as
“sub-tables.”
This definition requires three additional remarks:
• We have used quotation marks, because Oracle not
only supports table partitioning, but also index
partitioning. So database designers can group the
rows in a table (now without quotation marks) or
the entries in index (leaf) blocks and store the
results as virtual subsets called “partitions.”
Nevertheless, the table or the index can still be
accesses as one single object, if this is necessary.
• Depending on application needs, an index on a
table can be partitioned (“local index”), but can
as well remain unpartitioned (“global index”).
If multiple indexes on a table exist– a situation
which is rather normal in SAP systems–, some of
them can be local, some global.
• That rows can be grouped “based on the value(s)”
in one or more column(s) is a very generic statement.
Oracle provides many possible strategies to
do exactly that. The strategies which are most
important in SAP environments are called list and
range partitioning. In order to implement list
partitioning, a list of values has to be established
which explicitly mentions every single value
(example: countries, locations). In order to
implement range partitioning, it is sufficient to
define ranges by stating a start and end (example:
January 1-31, February 1-28, etc.).
Oracle Index Compression for SAP Customers 13
Benefits of Oracle Partitioning
Partitioning provides benefits for users as well as for
administrators.
The main benefit for users is improved performance
(which, in turn, is a benefit for administrators,
because users are happy). The technical reason for
this performance improvement is called “partition
pruning”. Let us suppose a table partitioned by month
and an application that wants to generate a monthly
report based on this table. Receiving the request, the
Oracle database will immediately realize that all
partitons which need to be considered are located in
one single partition, and therefore it will scan this
partition only. This reduces I/O, memory usage and
CPU workload dramatically, and therefore customers
almost always see a performance improvement by a
factor of 5, 10, or even more. Even if a weekly report
needs to be generated, the table partition in combi-
nation with a local (i.e. partitioned) index leads to
similar results, as the index partition which needs to
be scanned is much smaller than a non-partitioned
index.
The main benefit for administrators is the fact that
partitions can be managed individually and independently.
If a table consists of 90% historical and 10% active
data and if partitioning was used to separate historical
and active data, it is rather likely that administrative
procedures such as daily backup or reorganization can
be restricted to the partitions containing active data.
This reduces unnecessary workload as well as the time
needed for these jobs. Moreover, partitions can be
created, dropped, or merged independently and
online, so no additional maintenance downtime is
required.
The main benefit for the whole company is cost
reduction. If, again, active and historical data have
been separated, it is evident that historical data –
accessed rarely or not at all – can be moved to slower
and therefore less expensive disks. Once this goal is
accomplished, additional technologies such as com-
pression may be used to further reduce the amount
of disk space needed (see Figure 2). Now – and only
now – compression can be used selectively in order to
achieve optimal results: historical partitions can be
compressed, which reduces disk space, whereas the
active partitions remain uncompressed, which avoids
CPU overhead.
14

Figure 2 D ATA B A S E S PA C E M A N A G E M E N T

Step 1: Objects as Unstructured Units Step 2: Analyze Data

Step 3: Implement Range Partitioning Step 4: Use Different Types of Disks

Oracle Partitioning for SAP Products

Many years ago, SAP realized the benefits, and in
particular the performance improvements provided
by table and index partitioning. Therefore, Oracle
Partitioning is supported by SAP for SAP BI systems
as well as OLTP systems such as SAP ERP.

However, there is a difference. For SAP BI, Oracle

Partitioning is not only supported, but also imple-
mented. This means that the questions as to which
tables should be partitioned and how, are already
answered by SAP, that Partitioning is implemented
during the installation and configuration process,
Step 5: Compress Historical Partitions

and that partition management tools are provided
by SAP. This can be done, because the answer to the
question, which tables should be partitioned and
how, is the same for all SAP BI systems. In contrast,
Oracle Partitioning for SAP ERP is supported, but
there is no default implementation provided by SAP.
It is easy now, to guess the reason: the answer to the
question which tables should be partitioned and how
is not the same for all customers and all systems.
However, with SAP ERP databases reaching a size of
10, 20 or 30 Terabytes (in some cases even more) and
90% of the data located in a handful of giant tables,
there was an urgent need for a solution. This solution,
which was developed over the past 2 years, consists
of 2 parts: a partitioning method provided by Oracle
and a management interface provided by SAP.
An Oracle Partitioning Method for SAP ERP
The implementation of Oracle Partitioning in data-
bases that are part of SAP ERP systems requires
answers to two questions: Which tables (and indexes)
benefit most from partitioning? And how should
these tables/indexes be partitioned?
The first part is comparatively easy. Generally spea-
king, the largest tables and the indexes defined on
these tables will benefit most. So nothing but a
simple analysis of table sizes is required. Besides,
experience from implementation projects in the past
shows that it is not necessary to consider tens of
thousands of tables, but that there is a rather limited
set of candidates (30-40 tables).
The real challenge for the implementation of Oracle
Partitioning in SAP ERP systems consists in finding
suitable partitioning keys. In almost all cases range
partitioning requires the existence of a time-based
column, which can be used for the definition of ranges
(for details see the Oracle White Paper “Partitioning
for SAP R/3. A Guide for Planning and Setup of
Oracle Partitioning in SAP R /3 Systems”). A few
tables among the candidates contain such a column,
however most of them do not.
Oracle Index Compression for SAP Customers 15
In order to overcome this limitation, it is necessary
to look for some other time-related information,
which can be used. Fortunately, this kind of informa-
tion is available. To comply with legal requirements,
it must be guaranteed for a couple of document types
that they are numbered in ascending order with no
gap between the numbers. To ensure this, SAP uses a
special table, called NRIV, which manages the num-
bers that are available. This table is the key to the
solution. All tables that are candidates for partitio-
ning and do not contain a time stamp column at
least contain a material, purchase order or, generally
speaking, a document number, which was provided by
the NRIV-based number generator. And as we can be
sure that number n+1 was generated after number n,
we have indirect time information at our disposal.
This is step 1.
Of course, there is still a difference. The NRIV-based
number generator generates a continuous and
unstructured stream of numbers, whereas the stream
of real time stamps comes with predefined sub-units
such as years and months. And this difference is
important, as the predefined sub-units are used as
partitioning criteria (table partitioned by year, by
month, etc.). So, as step 2, we need to analyze for
every table that we want to partition the usage it
makes of NRIV. If, e.g., we want to partition a table
by month and it turns out that, on average, for this
particular table 100,000 distinct NRIV-based num-
bers are generated every month, we simply imple-
ment a partitioning scheme with 100,000 records
per partition – et voilà, we have a table partitioned
“by month.”
The SAP Partitioning Engine
Sounds difficult? It may be complex, but the good
news is, that the complex analysis and maintenance
jobs can be automated. Therefore, Oracle, in the
initial phase of the project, had developed a set of
tools that was based on Oracle’s own technologies,
mainly PL/SQL procedures. Although this worked
fine for a couple of installations, it was a consulting-
based solution, which is useful for non-standard SAP
requirements, but should not be necessary for stan-
dard environments. To make the innovative method
described above available to more customers, SAP
has developed their own solution, based on the con-
cept provided by Oracle.
16

The SAP solution name is SAP Partitioning Engine,
and it is fully integrated in the SAP system. It has
three main parts:
• The first part is a transaction, which is used to
initially transform non-partitioned tables into
partitioned ones. This transaction has built-in
functionality, which includes a list of well-known
SAP tables, their partitioning key as well as an
automatic adjustment for partition sizes. The list
covers most of the SAP standard tables and some
tables having the tendency to grow to very large
sizes. For special purposes, enhanced expert functio-
nality is available to adjust the partitioning pro-
perties to the users needs. In this first step the
table is analyzed based on a set of predefined rules
and a DDL-statement is prepared, to create the
appropriate partitioning layout for this table as
well as the correct index definitions. To finally
transform the table, the brspace utility can be used.
With a new command line option, brspace is capable
to fetch the prepared DDL statements from the
database to transform the existing table into a par-
titioned one by executing an online reorganization.
brspace also takes care of the correct statistics on
the new partitioned table.
• Once the table is partitioned, new partitions must
be created on demand to keep up with the newly
created rows. This is automated in the second part.
This SAP transaction will compare the current fil-
ling level of the table with current status of the
table partitioning. If needed, new empty partitions
will be created online to store the new table data.
This operation is very fast and can be executed any
time, without any impact on the running SAP
system.
Using the SAP Partitioning Engine allows SAP custo-
mers to make use of the Oracle partitioning techno-
logy, without the need to be familiar with Oracle
programming. The predefinition of the most com-
mon tables that are candidates for partitioning allows
less experienced Oracle users to benefit from this
innovative approach.
TABLE AND INDEX
COMPRESSION
Storage Efficiency
When asked, how explosive database growth can be
managed, several database vendors will immediately
talk about compression techniques. We already dis-
cussed, why this should not be your primary concern
and that you should start with implementing a struc-
tured database. However, even if this is considered
complete and you want to know which additional
technologies are available that can help you make the
most efficient use of your disk space, you should not
immediately jump into topics such as compression
techniques and compression ratios. Instead, you
should try to get an overall idea of storage efficiency.
In current discussions about compression techniques,
“compression” is always understood as something
that needs administrator intervention: administrators
need to decide, whether or not – and if yes, for which
objects – to use it, and then they need to implement
it. If we accept this definition, the main difference
between storage efficiency and compression consists
in the fact that a database system may or may not

• If the table is archived, the number of rows stored

in the oldest partitions will decrease. The trans-
action of the SAP Partitioning Engine is responsible
for freeing up the space no longer used in these
partitions. The space is freed by executing a merge
operation on the oldest partitions. The result is one
small partition containing the remaining rows and
a lot of free space within the tablespace, which can
be used for creating new partitions. This transaction
can also be executed while SAP is up and running.

offer technologies which could be called “implicit
compression”: technologies which make sure that the
least possible amount of disk space is used to store
data, but which are switched on by default and the-
refore simply do their job.
A simple example can help clarify the difference. Let
us assume that exactly the same data are loaded into
two databases D1 (based on the software provided by
vendor X) and D2 (based on the software provided
by vendor Y). Due to different “implicit compres-
sion” features, 1,000 GB disk space are needed to
store the data in D1, whereas 1,500 GB are needed
to store them in D2. Let us now assume that after
the initial load compression is used to decrease the
amount of disk space needed, and that it is possible
to shrink D1 by a factor of 2.5 (60%), whereas it is
possible to shrink D2 by a factor of 3.0 (67%).
In that case D1 would have a final size of 400 GB,
D2 a final size of 500 GB. Which means: D2’s com-
pression ratio would be higher, but D1 would provide
the best overall storage efficiency.
Oracle 10g already comes with the most comprehen-
sive set of “implicit compression” features, and every
new version adds new features. Among the most
important ones are
• variable length representation of number values
(instead of fixed length),
• most efficient representation of variable length
character strings,
• variable length Unicode representation (UTF-8
instead of UTF-16),
• highly compressed bitmap indexes.
As a consequence, customers find that Oracle needs
up to 40% less disk space for the same data than
other databases even without (explicit) compression.
Sure, this fact does not really help administrators
who see their Oracle database growing rapidly. But
it tells them: it could be worse, much worse.
Oracle Index Compression for SAP Customers 17
Setting Realistic Expectations
There is a second topic that should be considered
before looking into the details of the compression
techniques provided by Oracle (or by other databases,
for that matter). As “compression” is currently a
buzzword, it is safe to assume that at least some sta-
tements about what can be achieved by compressing
data are a little bit exaggerated. A glance at the rea-
lity, therefore, can be useful to set realistic expectati-
ons.
First, it is important to be aware of the fact that
compression is activated on the object level (i.e. for
individual tables or indexes), not on the database
level. Therefore, if you are told that by compressing
an object you can achieve x percent disk space savings,
it is necessary to ask: on the object level or on the
database level?
Second, in many production compression test cases a
simple copy of the database was used. But everybody
is aware of the fact that during its life time a data-
base becomes less and less efficient in terms of disk
space usage (mainly due to delete operations) and
that 20-30% of disk space can be saved by a simple
database reorganization. This is something we should
keep in mind, when we are told that 40 or 50% of
disk space were saved by compressing “the whole
database.”
Third, nobody wants to compress the whole database.
Not only is it too much work to compress tens of
thousands of tables, it is a useless effort, too, because
the overwhelming majority of all tables and indexes
is very small and cannot be compressed efficiently.
Most customers compress the 10, 20, 50 or 100
largest tables and the indexes defined on them.
Last, but not least, there is no way to compress “the
database”, as it is no homogeneous mass of data.
Broadly speaking, it consists of index data and table
data, and table data, in turn, are divided into struc-
tured data (numbers, character strings) and unstruc-
tured data (LONGs, LOBs). As of today, all databases
have different compression algorithms (if they have
them at all) for these three different types of data,
and the different algorithms provide different results.
18
As a rough estimate, in an Oracle database that is
part of an SAP ERP system, 33% of the allocated
disk space is used for index data, 55% for structured
and 12% for unstructured table data. If we assume
(unrealistically) that all objects are compressed and
that an average compression rate of 70% is achieved
on the object level, we find that on the database level
at most 23% can be saved by compressing index
data, 39% by compressing structured table data, and
8% by compressing unstructured table data. If we
assume (more in line with real life) that only the
largest objects (or 80% of the allocated disk space)
are compressed and that an average compression rate
of 60% is achieved, a realistic goal is: 15% for index
data, 25% for structured, and 5% for unstructured
table data.
Index Key Compression
Oracles Index Key Compression allows repeating
values in the leaf blocks of a B*Tree index (i.e. not
in a bitmap index) to be replaced by shorter tokens.
The creation of a compressed index is trivial, if the
index is defined on one single column of the base
table, as there can be no doubt about what “repeating
values” means. If, however, the index is defined on
multiple columns, the situation is less clear. Consider
an index defined on five columns (C1, C2, C3, C4, C5)
of a table T. We can search for repeating values in C1
only, in C1+C2, in C1+C2+C3, in C1+C2+C3+C4,
or in C1+C2+C3+C4+C5. It is probably obvious
that the disk space savings which can be achieved are
not the same for these five alternatives. Even worse:
There is no guarantee that the more columns we con-
sider the more disk space is saved. Experience shows
that the optimum tends to be somewhere in the
middle (see Figure 3, which, for simplicity’s sake,
assumes that all values have the same length).
This means: Not only do database administrators need
to find the indexes that are good candidates for com-
pression. If the index is defined on multiple columns
(which is a very common case in SAP environments),
they also need to determine how to split the column
values into a leading part (called the prefix), which
will be searched for repeating values, and the remain-
der (called the suffix), which will be left uncompressed.
In order to make this job easier, Oracle provides a tool
(called IND_COMP), that calculates the prefix/suffix
ratio which achieves most disk space savings.
If you want to compress an Oracle database in your
SAP environment, Index Key Compression is a very
good feature to start with. Not only is it easy and
efficient. There is also no major change in the algo-
rithm or the internal storage structures, when you
upgrade from Oracle 10g to Oracle 11g, so no effort
is lost.
Data Compression
Compression of structured data (number values,
character strings) in table columns requires three
steps:
• Find repeating values, i.e. candidate values for
compression.
• Build a list of these candidate values and attach a
number to each of them (i.e. build a symbol table).
• Replace each occurrence of the repeating values
by the appropriate number.
As the number is considerably shorter than the
original value, this approach can result in disk space
savings of 70% or more.
This is a common, almost a standard approach. The
unique aspect of the Oracle implementation is the fact
that the symbol table is built for and stored in every
single block. Or (to put it more precisely): there is
not one symbol table per table (segment), there are
many small and different symbol tables, each of them
built from the data in a single block and stored in
that particular block. Or (yet another version): Oracle
does not use a global symbol table, but many local
symbol tables – divide and conquer (see Figure 4 on
page 21).
There are several advantages of this approach over the
global symbol table approach:
• All symbol tables consist of a few entries only.
Therefore the numbers used as pointers to the
uncompressed values are very small. Furthermore,
there is no need to restrict the overall number of
values that can be compressed.
 Oracle Index Compression for SAP Customers 19

Figure 3 ORACLE INDEX KEY COMPRESSION

Step 1: Uncompressed Index Step 2: Compressed Index (Prefix = 1)

Step 3: Compressed Index (Prefix = 2) Step 4: Compressed Index (Prefix = 3)

Step 5: Compressed Index (Prefix = 4) Step 4: Compressed Index (Prefix = 5)

20
• If a user wants to read a record, the compressed
values must be decompressed (pointers replaced by
original values). Oracle’s implementation makes
sure that all data needed for this operation are
located in one single block, whereas, if a global
symbol table is used, at least 2 blocks are needed.
Therefore, Oracle’s approach reduces I/O and
improves performance.
• A global symbol table is static. Once it is created,
it does not change. However, the values inserted
into the table can change. Suppose that the symbol
table was created end of March. So “January”,
“February” and “March” are in the symbol table
and can be compressed. But “April” and “May” are
not, cannot be compressed, and therefore the com-
pression ratio will deteriorate over time …
• … unless the database administrator rebuilds the
symbol table. But here again the Oracle advantage
is obvious: As a local compression dictionary is
built for every individual block, Oracle will simply
include the value “April” in the symbol table of all
blocks that are created in April. No administrator
intervention is required. Oracle, therefore, has
chosen the approach that offers more flexibility and
less management effort.
It might seem that a disadvantage of many local
symbol tables is the fact that more disk space is
needed. However, customer experience shows that
this is more than compensated for by the ability of
Oracle’s data compression algorithm to automatically
adapt to changing values.
Oracle 10g data compression was originally designed
for historical data in DSS systems. Data compression,
therefore, works for batch loads, but not for inserts
and updates of single records. As a result, Oracle 10g
data compression can only be used in SAP BI systems,
not in OLTP systems such as SAP ERP. Oracle 11g
therefore comes with a completely new algorithm:
Data are inserted by users in uncompressed format.
Later on, background processes compress the data,
and these processes do not care whether the data were
inserted via single row inserts or batch loads. Oracle
11g also supports compression of unstructured data.
These new features, however, do not invalidate the
general rules which we discussed in the first section
of this article. Just because you can compress all tables
in all kinds of systems, once you have upgraded to
Oracle 11g, it does not follow that it is a good idea
or best practice to do so. The power of Oracle 11g is
not that it can handle larger unorganized masses of
data, the power of Oracle 11g is that it helps establish
smart space and data management strategies.
BACKUP & RECOVERY
Key Database Protection Requirements
The key VLDB backup and recovery questions which
need to be addressed are:
• How to backup/recover in a satisfactory time-
frame?
• How to recover at an application or business
object level?
• How to protect data in a 24 x7 environment?
• How to manage software, infrastructure, and
operational costs for data protection/disaster
recovery?
Backup and recovery are not database-only topics.
An optimal overall solution requires the right choice
of database storage and backup media as well.
Nevertheless, it is important to also select the most
efficient Oracle backup and recovery features.
Oracle Recovery Manager
Recovery Manager (RMAN) is an Oracle database
client, which performs backup and recovery tasks
and automates administration of backup strategies.
It greatly simplifies the backing up, restoration,
and recovery of database files. RMAN handles all
underlying database procedures before and after
backup or restoration in order to reduce the possible
risk of data being lost. It provides a common inter-
face for backup tasks across different host operating
systems and offers features not available through
user-managed methods, such as parallelization of
backup/recovery data streams, a backup files reten-
tion policy, and a detailed history of all backups.
 Oracle Index Compression for SAP Customers 21

Figure 4 C O M P R E S S I O N O F S T R U C T U R E D TA B L E D ATA

xxxx xxxxx xxxx xxxxx xxxx xxxxx

xxxx xxxxx xxxx xxxxx xxxx xxxxx
xxxx xxxxx xxxx xxxxx xxxx xxxxx
xxxx xxxxx xxxx xxxxx xxxx xxxxx
xxxx xxxxx xxxx xxxxx xxxx xxxxx

Symbol Table Data Block Data Block Data Block

Implementation option 1: One global symbol table per data segment (table), stored in dedicated blocks

Symbol
Tables

xxxx xxxxx xxxx xxxxx xxxx xxxxx

xxxx xxxxx xxxx xxxxx xxxx xxxxx
xxxx xxxxx xxxx xxxxx xxxx xxxxx
xxxx xxxxx xxxx xxxxx xxxx xxxxx
xxxx xxxxx xxxx xxxxx xxxx xxxxx

Symbol Table Data Block Data Block Data Block

Implementation option 2: Many local symbol tables, each of them built from data in a single block,
and stored in that particular block
22
RMAN is integrated with the database management
tools provided by SAP, such as BRBACKUP,
BRARCHIVE, BRRESTORE, and BRRECOVER.
Depending on the BR*Tools version and its patch
level, new RMAN functionality is integrated to
provide enhanced security, flexibility, and safety.
Since Oracle Recovery Manager is designed specifi-
cally for Oracle database, it is integrated with the
RDBMS. Therefore the RMAN offers the following
advantages over other restoration/recovery manage-
ment tools:
• Detection of physical and logical database
corruption: Compared with other backup tools,
one of the advantages users experience when using
RMAN is that data files are checked for corruption
during backup. Logical and physical errors in data-
base blocks are recognized automatically.
• Incremental backups: RMAN backups of data
files can be either full backups or incremental
backups. A full backup is a backup that includes
every used block in the file. If a full data file back-
up is created as an image copy, the entire file con-
tents are reproduced exactly. An incremental backup
of a data file captures images of blocks that have
been changed since a specific point in time, usually
when a previous full backup or incremental backup
was undertaken.
• Fast incremental backup using block change
tracking: Incremental backup has been supported
since Oracle 8. However, as with every incremental
solution, the key is how to find “what has been
changed”. In previous versions, all data files had to
be checked to determine, if a block had been modi-
fied or not. With Oracle 10g, block change tracking
is now available. RMAN’s block change tracking
feature for incremental backups uses the recorded
changed blocks in the Block Change Tracking File
(BCTF). This file is very small (only a bitmap
representation of block addresses) and its size is
proportional to the size of the database and the
number of enabled redo threads. If change tracking
is enabled, RMAN uses the BCTF to identify
changed blocks for an incremental backup, thus
avoiding the need to scan every block in the data
file for changes.
• Reduction in backup size: Any unformatted
database blocks that have never been changed will
not be included in the backup created by RMAN.
This reduces the size of backup files compared to
a pure data file copy. This form of compression is
known as unused block compression.
• Reduction in redo log information: The
BEGIN/END BACKUP commands are not needed
when running an online backup using RMAN.
RMAN reads data blocks from the data files like
all other Oracle shadow processes, which eliminates
the need for data block copies to be placed into a
redo log buffer.
• Compression of archive logs and backups:
RMAN can write backup sets in a format that uses
binary compression to reduce the backup set size.
Using compressed backup sets saves storage space
as well as network bandwidth when backing up
across a network (see SAP Notes 968507 and
1101530).
• Backup verification: Given the amount of time
spent backing up the database, you may be surpri-
sed to learn that sometimes the backup itself is not
free of errors (network, tape device, backup software
bugs, etc.). In order to make sure that the backup is
a valid backup and can be used for restoration pur-
poses, backups should be verified from time to time.
RMAN can run verification checks on backups
using the BACKUP VALIDATE command.
Oracle Flashback Technologies
Many studies show that 40% of application outages
are caused by operator or user errors. Making mistakes
is just part of being human. But these errors are ex-
tremely difficult to avoid and can be very difficult to
recover from without advance planning and the right
technology. Such errors can result in “logical” data
corruption or cause one or more components of the IT
infrastructure to cease operating. While it is relatively
simple to rectify the failure of an individual compo-
nent, detection of and repairs to logical data corrup-
tion, such as accidental deletion of valuable data, is a
time-consuming operation that results in a huge loss
in business productivity. Typical user errors may in-
clude accidental deletion of valuable data, deleting the
wrong data, and dropping the wrong table.

Flashback Database quickly rewinds an Oracle database
to a previous point in time to correct any problems
caused by logical data corruptions or user errors.
Flashback Database is like a ‘rewind button’ for your
database. It provides database point-in-time recovery
without the user first having to restore a backup of
the database. When you eliminate the time it takes
to restore a database backup from tape, database point-
in-time recovery is fast. The Flashback Database capa-
bility, accessible from both RMAN and SQL*Plus
using the FLASHBACK DATABASE command, is
similar to conventional point-in-time recovery in its
effects: it allows you to return a database to its state
at a time in the recent past.
Enabling Flashback Database functionality provides
the following benefits:
• Eliminate the time required to restore a backup:
When a database is down because it runs into a
catastrophic problem, millions of dollars in revenue
is lost because a company can no longer operate.
• Eliminate redo apply delay on standby database:
Flashback Database is seamlessly integrated with
Data Guard. A standby database can be quickly
and easily flashed back to any point in time, so
there is no delay due to redo apply.
For more information see SAP Notes 937492, 966073,
966117, and 1125923.
Oracle Data Guard
Oracle Data Guard is software available with the data-
base, that creates, maintains, and monitors one or more
standby databases to protect enterprise data from fai-
lures, disasters, errors, and corruptions. Data Guard
maintains these standby databases as synchronized
copies of the production database. These standby data-
bases can be located at remote disaster recovery sites
thousands of miles away from the production data
center, or they may be located in the same city, same
campus, or even in the same building. If the produc-
tion database becomes unavailable because of a planned
or an unplanned outage, Data Guard can switch any
standby database to the production role, thus mini-
mizing the downtime associated with the outage,
and preventing any data loss.
Oracle Index Compression for SAP Customers 23
Data Guard for SAP can be used at least in two critical
circumstances:
• When only the primary database crashes and all
other components – e.g. SAP application instances
– are still alive: In this case you can easily switch
your SAP application servers to be connected to the
opened standby database and, depending on the
protection mode, you may not need to wait for any
apply of database changes. Failover of the SAP
instances happens in a smooth way by using specific
and already prepared SAP profiles or even better by
using virtual IP address for the database server.
• When the database and SAP applications are not
online any more, e.g. outage of the whole data cen-
ter: In this case you can start an already prepared
SAP system including the standby database after
having synchronized the standby database, if this
has not already happened.
A standby database can also act as a read/write database
for testing, training, or reporting by using Flashback
Database after completion of the desired task to rewind
the standby database to its initial state and to serve
as potential disaster recovery site as before.
Like RMAN and Flashback Database, Oracle’s Standby
Database functionality is integrated with the admini-
stration tools provided by SAP:
• In the standby database scenario, you can use the
SAP tool BRARCHIVE to control the transfer of
the offline redo log files from the primary to the
standby instance.
• The main advantage of the standby database is that
you do not have to perform backups in the primary
(that is, production) database system. Instead, a
standby database enables you to back up the data
files of the standby database. Therefore, database
backups do not increase the load on the host of the
primary database instance in any way. Since produc-
tion operation does not occur on the standby data-
base, all host resources can be made available for
the database backup. The SAP tool BRBACKUP
can support you when backing up the data in the
standby database.
 24

“Oracle RAC enabled us to fully implement our requirements. This puts us in a very comfortable
and secure situation.“

– R O S S B A R R AT T,
Business Intelligence Manager for NSWFB

O R A C L E R E A L A P P L I C AT I O N C L U S T E R S ( R A C )
FOR SAP: ESSENTIAL AND RELIABLE CORNERSTONE
FOR THE NSW FIRE BRIGADES
High stability, performance boost and minimized TCO for SAP

New South Wales Fire
Brigades
Oracle Products & Services:
• Oracle RAC 10.2.04 EE
• Oracle Database 10g
• Oracle Clusterware
(OCFS / shared oracle home)
• Oracle Data Guard
• Oracle RMAN
• Oracle Support
The New South Wales Fire Brigades
(NSWFB), which employs around 3,900
full-time and 3,300 part-time firefighters
and supports 5,500 volunteer members,
is the largest organization of its kind in
Australia, and uses SAP on Oracle Real
Application Clusters (RAC). The database
cluster technology from Oracle provides
the NSWFB with several crucial benefits.
The state of New South Wales is situated on
Australia’s southeast coast and covers a total
area of 800,640 square kilometers. That’s three
times the size of Great Britain. New South
Wales is also Australia’s most economically
important state. The coastal city of Sydney is
one of the area’s key industrial centers and
is also home to the head administrative office
of the New South Wales Fire Brigades, which
operates 340 fire stations throughout the state.
The NSWFB depends on its thousands of full-
time and part-time firefighters to respond to
incidents such as fires, rescues and hazardous
materials emergencies, and works with other
government agencies to combat the consequen-
ces of bushfires, flood disasters, earth-quakes
or other serious incidents such as terrorist
attacks.
In the NSWFB organization, an agency of the
state of New South Wales, which operates 24
hours a day, technology – including informa-
tion technology – plays a decisive role. This
applies to communication and the sharing of
information in an emergency in order to save
lives; maintenance management of the close
to 700 firefighting vehicles and the deploy-
ment of personnel; and also administration,
including finance and human resources.
Cornerstone of enterprise content
Since 2008 the New South Wales Fire Brigades
has been engaged in implementing a new IT
direction fit for the future. Between early 2009
and the end of 2010, new IT systems and
solutions will gradually come on stream; IT
modernization has already made tremendous
progress. “Parts of our IT environment and
infrastructure dated from the 1990s and no
longer satisfied our changed requirements.
In some areas we are already making good use
of new IT solutions,” explains Ross Barratt,
Business Intelligence Manager for the NSWFB.
A number of key milestones have already been
achieved in administrative services, which are
provided by the organization’s Operational
Support department. This includes the imple-
mentation of SAP ERP application systems
with Financials (FI), Human Capital Manage-
ment (HR), and SAP Netweaver Business
Warehouse together with Oracle databases or
Oracle RAC. Within its IT strategy, the New
South Wales Fire Brigades plans to use Oracle
for its Enterprise Content Management system.

Smooth RAC implementation
“It goes without saying that the database plays
a key role in the use of SAP. At the end of
the day it’s a critical component of any SAP
system,” emphasizes Barratt. The key issues
of concern at the concept planning stage were
the stability, security and cost efficiency of
the database used with SAP. These were the
primary reasons for choosing Oracle RAC.
In view of what has been achieved with the
Oracle database cluster technology, it’s safe to
say that the NSWFB's decision was spot on:
“Oracle RAC enabled us to fully implement
our requirements.” The first application that
the NSWFB used in conjunction with Oracle
RAC were the SAP solutions Finance (FI) and
Netweaver Business Warehouse (BI).
Oracle RAC (10.2.04 EE) was implemented
on a 3-node cluster on Dell R900 servers
(two-way servers with 4-core CPU) in con-
junction with EMC Clariion storage systems
and the operating system Suse Linux Enter-
prise Server (SLES10) from Novell. As Barrett
explains, “The Oracle RAC installation went
very smoothly and only took six weeks.”
Added value – with no ifs or buts
Using Oracle Real Application Cluster meant
several benefits in one package, resulting in
real added value.
Firstly, staff were very satisfied with the
system’s extremely high stability with SAP.
If a node in the database cluster should fail
for any reason, its job is taken over by another
node without any system interruption. In ad-
dition to Oracle RAC, the NSWFB also uses
Oracle Data Guard for disaster and recovery
management. This allows the organization to
effectively back up its stored data, for example
in the event of a failure in the primary system
environment. For recovery management the
organization relies on the Oracle solution
RMAN.
Oracle 10g RAC for SAP at NSW Fire Brigades 25
Barratt is also pleased about the fact that:
“Oracle RAC helped us to considerably speed
up our payroll process. Payroll used to take
hours, but now it only takes minutes.”
He also mentions another benefit: the fact
that Oracle RAC minimizes the SAP IT infra-
structure costs, which results in a lower total
cost of ownership (TCO). Barratt comments,
“Our infrastructure costs are very low compared
with other approaches. For example, if we
want to enlarge the overall system we don’t
have to replace servers. We can simply use our “The Oracle RAC
RAC environment to flexibly and securely installation went very
extend the environment.” smoothly and only took
Here, the NSWFB also benefits from the
six weeks.”
option of setting up and using Enterprise
Grids with Oracle RAC. The organization
has set up what is known in grid computing – Ross Barratt,
as a mixed workload. The SAP, BI and other Business Intelligence
databases run in the same cluster. Manager for NSWFB.
Fixed plans to continue using RAC
With Oracle RAC, the NSWFB is extremely
well equipped to rise to the challenges of
today and tomorrow. They sum up what has
been achieved in these words: “With Oracle
RAC we are well positioned.”
According to the IT strategy, in the future
Oracle Real Application Clusters is the prefer-
red databases platform for the NSWFB. This
is primarily intended to ensure very high
stability and optimum system performance
at all times.
 26

“It had been decided for some time that we would use Oracle RAC in conjunction with SAP.
The SAP ERP upgrade and a new IT infrastructure provided the opportunity we needed to
turn the plan into reality. With Oracle RAC we are more flexible and we can cut down costs,
improve our performance and optimize SAP high availability.”

– FA U S T O C A P E L L E T T I ,
Direction IT & Innovations – IT Operations, SAP CCC
Technical Coordinator, Kuwait Petroleum Q8, Italia SpA

KUWAIT PETROLEUM Q8 COMBINES SAP ERP

U P G R A D E W I T H U S E O F O R A C L E R E A L A P P L I C AT I O N
CLUSTERS (RAC)

Industry:
Downsteam (refining and
marketing) activities outside
KUWAIT Petroleum S.p.A.
Workforce:
Approx. 4700 (entire company)
Oracle Products & Services:
• Oracle Database 10g
• Oracle Real Application
Clusters (RAC) 10.2
• Oracle Clusterware
SAPCTL/Control Utility
• Oracle Support
Key Benefits:
• More flexibility and
scalability in use of SAP
• Greater SAP stability / high
availability
• Enhanced performance
• Base for extensive experience
with new technologies
Far-reaching IT modernization
If you’ve ever driven through Italy, the Q8
logo with the two interlocking multi-colored
sails is sure to be a familiar sight. Kuwait
Petroleum Italia (Kupit) is the Italian sub-
sidiary of Kuwait Petroleum International
(KPI), the international company which with
a workforce of 4700 employees coordinates
the downstream activities of Kuwait Petroleum
Corporation outside Kuwait. Kupit, which
operates more than 2750 fueling stations
under the Q8 brand and employs over 650
people, performs an extremely important job
within the international group of companies.
It is responsible for SAP deployment,
including some legacy applications, used
throughout the corporation. A more recent key
element is SAP ERP 6.0 (with IS Oil) and
SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence 7.0.
For the team and SAP CCC technical
coordinator Fausto Capelletti, 2007 was an
important milestone in the corporation’s IT
history. A total of three new IT orientations
were taken in hand and successfully imple-
mented. All three must be viewed in the
context of the SAP system and mean various
advantageous optimizations for the company:
firstly the replacement of the Unix system
landscape with a Linux system, based on
standard servers (Dell) and the Linux Red Hat
operating system, and secondly the migration
of SAP R/3 to SAP ERP 6.0 and SAP BW 3.1
to SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence 7.0.
In addition, the company is now using Oracle
Real Application Clusters together with the
new SAP applications.
As Fausto Capelletti explains, “Using up-to-
date versions and technologies means constant
improvements, which can take many different
forms. We introduce innovations and further
developments at an early stage to extract the
benefits early on. In an SAP environment you
have to take account of all the relevant compo-
nents or elements and stay focused on a con-
tinuous improvement process.”
Excellent experience with Oracle RAC
It’s no accident that Kuwait Petroleum opted
for Oracle RAC in combination with the SAP
ERP 6.0 upgrade. The company already had
very positive experience of working with
Oracle Real Application Clusters with its
non-SAP legacy applications, for example CRM
or data warehouse based on Oracle database.
“We wanted to still have the benefits of Oracle
RAC when using SAP. The obvious answer
was to use Oracle RAC with the SAP ERP
upgrade,” recalls IT expert Capelletti. Oracle
has also been a strategic IT partner of Kuwait
Petroleum ever since the changeover of the
SAP database Informix some years ago.
 Oracle 10g RAC for SAP at Kuwait Petroleum 27
27

The introduction of Oracle RAC, including

testing, only took around three months. To-
gether with SAP and Oracle partner TechEdge,
based in Milan (Italy), and with the help of
Oracle’s Global Technology Center for SAP
in Walldorf (Germany), the project was
implemented within the planned timescale.
At Kuwait Petroleum the Dell hardware with
2X4 AMD Opteron CPUs (each with 32 GB
RAM) runs in a 2-node RAC cluster (Oracle
Clusterware SAPCTL based on Oracle Cluster-
ware to make SAP high available). The storage
systems are supplied by NetApp.

Both systems, SAP ERP (ECC 6.0 with the

“We wanted to still
industry solution IS Oil) and SAP NetWeaver
have the benefits of
Business Intelligence 7.0 run on Oracle RAC.
Oracle RAC when using
The databases (Oracle 10.2) are over 1 TB in
size each. In total there are more than 1100 SAP. The obvious
SAP users. The applications are used in several answer was to use
languages. Since November, Oracle RAC has Oracle RAC with the
been running in conjunction with the R/3 and SAP ERP upgrade.”
BW successors at Kuwait Petroleum.
– Fausto Capelletti,
Stable, future-proof foundation Direction IT &
By implementing Oracle RAC, the company Innovations – IT
is now in a position to achieve a whole range Operations, SAP CCC.
All in all, Kuwait Petroleum did a very
of improvements. “Not only can we further impressive job with the ambitious three-step
increase the availability of SAP applications, change–a new hardware landscape, SAP ERP
which we are now using together with standard upgrade and Oracle RAC. The new IT environ-
servers and the Linux operating system. If one ment provides them with a stable, future-proof
of the two database instances fails, the other foundation that can be expanded whenever
takes over its tasks. Converting to Oracle Real required. The company can also utilize the
Application Clusters also resulted in more latest functions and technologies that can
flexibility and scalability, better performance benefit them in the global oil business.
and the use of a future-oriented technology,”
says IT coordinator Capelletti, adding:
“Oracle RAC also brings cost benefits and
reduces the total cost of ownership.” In the
medium term, the company plans to use
Oracle RAC in conjunction with other SAP
applications.
 28

“One of the main reasons we selected Oracle Real Application Clusters is because we were
familiar with the Oracle platform and we knew from experience how reliably it works.”

– ANDRE EDWARDS,
Manager, Information Management Services,
The National Gas Company of Trinidad and Tobago Limited

T H E N AT I O N A L G A S C O M PA N Y O F T R I N I D A D
AND TOBAGO LIMITED (NGC) SIMPLIFIES IT
National Gas Company of INFRASTRUCTURE WHILE IMPROVING RELIABILITY
Trinidad and Tobago Limited
AND SCALABILITY
Point Lisas Industrial Estate,
Couva, Republic of Trinidad
and Tobago.

www.ngc.co.tt
Industry:
Natural Gas
Annual Revenue:
US$1.74 billion
Employees:
750
Oracle Products & Services:
• Oracle Database
• Oracle Real Application
Clusters
Key Benefits:
• Created a highly reliable,
scalable, and flexible IT
environment
• Enabled reliable perfor-
manceof SAP applications
running on Linux
• Ensured instantaneous
and full failover
• Reduced hardware and
maintenance costs
Each year, petroleum and natural gas extracted
from the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago’s
significant petroleum reserves contribute over
34% to the nation’s GDP, which in 2007 stood
at US$27 billion. In 1975, the Government
of Trinidad and Tobago founded The National
Gas Company of Trinidad and Tobago Limited
(NGC), charging it with the responsibility to
purchase, transport and sell the country’s natu-
ral gas resources for the benefit of the nation
as a whole.
After 30 years of operations, in 2005, NGC
began to experience the effects of inefficient
software applications and an ad hoc approach
to adding processing power. It therefore decided
to upgrade its core Enterprise Resource
Planning (ERP) applications for a closer look
at its data infrastructure, with an eye towards
improving its IT capability with greater
simplicity, reliability, and scalability.
“We wanted higher availability and a scalable
environment,” said Andre Edwards, “we also
wanted it to be scalable, and we didn’t want
to add more processing power unless we
needed it.”
One governing principle guided the proposed
IT infrastructure changes: simplicity. At the
same time, there was no fast, easy template
for implementing a system with the compo-
nents NGC wanted: an open source Linux
operating system, an Oracle database, and a
new SAP suite of ERP applications. The solu-
tion was to set up an environment based on
Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC).
Nodes, Not Hardware
Like all energy providers, NGC has had to
grapple with the cyclical expansions and
contractions of the market. In addition, NGC
has expanded considerably from its original
functions of gas purchase, sale and transmission
of natural gas. NGC is today a diversified
group of companies with operations and stra-
tegic investments in gas pipelines, industrial
sites, gas production, port and marine infra-
structure, Natural Gas Liquids and liquefied
natural gas (LNG).

NGC has coped with these fluctuations and
growth by purchasing more computing
equipment, which created a very complex IT
environment. The company therefore decided
in 2006 to streamline its IT operations on the
enterprise grid computing technology of Oracle
RAC. An option to Oracle database, Oracle
RAC is a cluster database with shared cache
technology that overcomes the limitations of
traditional shared-disk approaches.
“The alternative to Oracle RAC would have
been to manage three separate databases,
maintain backups, backup schedules, and any
kind of patching performance metrics for three
separate databases,” Edwards said. ”There is
no comparison to what we have now–which is
basically just one database across five nodes.”
A Better Disaster Plan
Tropical storms are the wild card every business
in the Caribbean archipelago faces. For NGC,
systems failure can mean disruption of gas
transmission services, discomfort for citizens
and businesses, and huge financial losses.
Failover capabilities were an important factor
for NGC in evaluating solutions. “As we were
looking into it, we realized there are some
features within Oracle that can assist us in
terms of disaster recovery,” Edwards said.
Oracle RAC’s failure detection and recovery
system, which relies on load-sharing among
nodes, eliminates a single point of failure.
With no single point of failure, the failure of
one node does not affect another node’s ability
to process transactions. The database remains
available on any surviving instance–thereby
averting losses and downtime.
NGC also hoped to leverage the load-sharing
capabilities during routine service shutdowns.
“You always worry about shutting down a
production database when it’s in use,” Edwards
said. “But since we have five nodes on our
Oracle RAC, we tried it, and it didn’t give us
any problems. Oracle and SAP just continued
running without any issues. The ability to take
down nodes without affecting availability is
critical for us,” he added.
Oracle RAC for SAP at National Gas Company 29
Why Oracle?
NGC’s project was a complicated one. On
a technical level, NGC wanted to build an
architecture that combined applications and
systems from multiple vendors–including
new SAP applications the company wanted
"With Oracle’s Real
to install. On a higher level, it wanted an
Application Clusters,
architecture that would reduce, not create,
complexity going forward–something simple, we can scale as the
stable, standardized, and scalable. Oracle need arises. Instead of
RAC was the only solution that could fulfill buying a lot of extra
all objectives, according to Edwards. capacity up front, we
can simply purchase
“Our idea was to create a standardized envi- additional capacity
ronment by leveraging Oracle database for all when we need it.”
mission-critical applications,” said Edwards.
“Some of those critical applications would be
– Andre Edwards,
SAP. Bear in mind that the applications were
going to be used throughout our entire orga- Manager, Information
Management
nization. Therefore, we needed to make certain
Services.
that they were available and reliable.”
Finally, NGC didn’t want to have to go back
to the drawing board–or systems manufactu-
rer–every time it experienced a growth spurt.
“We wanted a solution that would provide
redundancy, high availability, and a reliable
environment. We also wanted it be scalable so
that, in the future, if we needed more proces-
sing power, we could always add on, quickly
and affordably.”
 30
“I think the manage Implementation Process
ment of our existing NGC’s Oracle RAC implementation, which
environment is much has five nodes, began in January 2006 and
simpler with Oracle RAC.” was completed by mid-summer. The environ-
ment, which serves approximately 600 users,
– Andre Edwards, includes Dell OptiPlex desktops and Dell
Manager, Information PowerEdge Servers running Microsoft Windows
Management for SAP applications and Red Hat Linux for
Services. the database.
Since there is no Oracle-SAP-Dell-Linux con-
figuration available for general release, NGC
relied on the collaboration of all parties to
successfully implement the solution. “Oracle
worked with us extensively, as well as SAP,
in terms of certifying processes and the environ-
ment,” Edwards said. “There was some concern
initially, but in working with the partners, we
were able to overcome all the issues of concern.”
While NGC admits the first implementation
was tricky, a subsequent implementation of an
additional Oracle RAC–a two-node mirror
system–took only two weeks “Basically, we
know what to do, so it was easy,” Edwards said.
With Oracle RAC in place, NGC has achieved
its objective of simplifying its architecture,
according to Edwards. “Basically what we have
now is one database across five computing
nodes,” he said. “I think the management of
our existing environment is much simpler
with Oracle RAC.”
Advice from The National Gas Company of
Trinidad and Tobago Limited
• Before investing in a new system, see if new
technologies such as grid computing tech-
nology can be adapted to your business
needs. Such technologies can eliminate the
need to purchase a lot of unnecessarily
hardware down the road;
• Rather than buying excess technology that
sits idle, invest in an infrastructure that can
scale as need demands;
• Don’t think that because a configuration isn’t
available that it can’t be done. Our experience
proves we can have the products we wanted
and that they could work together.
The government of Trinidad and Tobago created the
National Gas Company of Trinidad and Tobago
Limited (NGC) in August 1975. Today, NGC is
a diversified group of companies with operations
and strategic investment in gas pipelines, port and
marine structures, industrial estates, oil and gas
production, LNG and natural gas liquids.
 Certified SAP on RAC Configurations for Windows and Linux 31

C E R T I F I E D S A P O N R A C C O N F I G U R AT I O N S
FOR WINDOWS AND LINUX
We have separate scenarios for Windows and Linux, see also SAP Note 527843

General Availability on Microsoft Windows General Availability on Red Hat and SuSE Linux

Oracle RAC 10.2 on Windows x86, x86_64 and IA64 Oracle RAC 10.2 on Linux x86, x86_64, IA64 and Power
for RHEL4, RHEL5, SLES9 and SLES10

• Oracle 10.2.0.4
• OCFS 10.2.0.4 (embedded in Oracle Clusterware Software) • Oracle 10.2.0.4

• Windows 2003 Release 2 EE, Service Pack 2 • OCFS2 1.2.3 or higher for database, Oracle software and SAP software

• SAP Enqueue Replication covered by Microsoft Cluster Services • OCFS2 1.4.x as of SLES 10 Support Package 2 or RHEL 5.2
(SAP Central Instance can be co-located with RAC instance)
• EMC Celerra NFS for database, Oracle software and SAP software
• iSCSI only supported up to 4 nodes
• NetAppliance NFS for database, Oracle software and SAP software
Not supported: • SAP Enqueue Replication covered by Oracle Clusterware (2 node
– crossover cables for interconnect (only Gigabit Ethernet, configuration, co-location of SAP Central Instance with RAC Instance)
minimum two cards)
• SAP Enqueue Replication covered by HP ServiceGuard or Red Hat
– Infiniband
Cluster (minimum 4 nodes are required, SAP central instance cannot
– ASM be co-located with RAC instance on same node)
– raw devices
Not supported:
– iSCSI – Firewire – crossover cables for interconnect (only Gigabit
Ethernet, minimum two cards) – Infiniband – Red Hat GFS
– Veritas CFS, ASM, raw devices
– IBM GPFS
32
S A P O N O R A C L E 1 0 g R A C AT G O T T WA L D P O RT
TECHNOLOGY
Serving the global market with a spirit
of invention
Gottwald Port Technology GmbH, based in
Gottwald Düsseldorf (Germany), a subsidiary of Demag
Port Technology GmbH
Cranes AG, is a supplier of harbor cranes and
port automation technologies. The company–
which invented the mobile harbor crane and
Headquarters:
sets the pace in the automation of container
Düsseldorf
handling–serves customers in over 90 coun-
tries. In the 2007/2008 business year it gene-
Industry sector: rated a turnover of close to € 325.5 million
Port and intermodal handling with a workforce of around 800 employees.
technologies, hardware and
software
With almost 1300 mobile harbor crane units
installed around the globe, the company is the
Turnover:
world market leader in this specialty market
€325.5 million
segment. As well as mobile harbor cranes, the
Workforce: portal cranes and floating cranes that developed
out of them, Gottwald’s product portfolio inclu-
800
des automated guided vehicles (AGVs) for
horizontal container transport, automated
stacking cranes (ASCs) and wide span gantries.
Systematic approaches at all levels
The company has made a name for itself in
the global market as a system supplier covering
the full range of port automation activities,
including planning, simulation, commissioning
and control of everyday processes.
At the IT level this includes system solutions
with appropriately adapted hardware and
software as well as individually adapted
navigation and management software
solutions that ensure smooth automated
operation of port facilities. The product range
is rounded off by state-of-the-art simulation
and emulation technologies for terminal
planning, design and capacity evaluation.
These provide a realistic picture of future
terminal structures and performance prior to
any planned investments being made,
providing validation for investment decisions.
As well as developing logistics solutions for
machinery and large-scale projects in sea and
inland ports–the company’s main field of
activity– Gottwald Port Technology also
attaches the necessary importance to business
management issues and the way they are
logically interconnected by cutting-edge
software solutions. The high standards of
technical design, performance and reliability
that the company places on its own products
are also reflected in its in-house ERP system.
A combination of Oracle database and SAP
expertise based on a reliable HP hardware plat-
form provided sustainability from a business
management point of view.

System landscape: initial situation in 2007
Flexible and future-proof thanks to scalabilitys
For ERP purposes, Gottwald Port Technology
has a typical three-level system landscape con-
sisting of a development system, a consolida-
tion system, and a productive system designed
as a cluster. Since 1996 the company has been
working in an HP Unix environment, running
SAP on Oracle database. Although obsolete
hardware was replaced by new generation hard-
ware on an ongoing basis, the company was
not able to satisfactorily fulfill its objective
of achieving high availability of the database
with a conventional cluster. It was a situation
that often caused sluggishness of the system–
a potential source of risk, particularly when
it came to producing the monthly statements
for Demag Cranes AG.
Prompted by the fact that the hardware main-
tenance contracts were about to expire, in
spring 2007 the IT team headed by Andreas
Rogge carried out a situation analysis. This
revealed that the best way to move towards
a fully failsafe system landscape with a high-
availability database on SAP was with Oracle
RAC.
Oracle 10g RAC for SAP at Gottwald 33
“We understood then
that cluster technology
doesn’t just mean
high availability, but
scalability too. As far as
we’re concerned that’s
the great advantage of
RAC for our system
landscape."
“It wasn’t until we sat down to discuss the
situation in detail with Oracle that we realized
how much room for improvement there was – Andreas Rogge,
in terms of batch job runtimes, unacceptable IT Manager for
response times for dialog processes and lots SAP Basis.
of other things too”, says Andreas Rogge, IT
Manager for SAP Basis, Information Techno-
logy, describing the situation in 2007.
The analysis not only impacted on the choice
of software but also resulted in a modified
hardware strategy. In the general structure of
the system landscape, more and more Intel-
based LINUX systems were being incorporated
in planning. A comprehensive cost/benefit
analysis revealed substantial benefits from
combining Oracle RAC with DELL PowerEdge
2950 processors. After careful consideration,
solutions involving HP-UX and RAC or HP-
UX and an SG cluster were thrown out because
of the associated costs and complexity.
34
System landscape: target situation in 2008
Combining expertise with partnership
At the beginning of 2008, Andreas Rogge
found the expert project partner he was looking
for to implement the general objectives and,
in particular, the migration of the SAP ERP
system. He and his team had an expert partner
with the necessary knowledge of Oracle RAC
and SAP ERP environments on NetApp
Switched Metro Cluster, in the shape of
Munich-based IS4IT, which had already
successfully implemented a similar project
at Munich’s clinical center.
After the DELL hardware was delivered to
certified partner IS4IT in early May 2008,
the project began to take shape. Things got
underway in mid-June as the development
system was migrated and a test phase was
successfully completed. Before the consolidation
system was actually migrated, it was copied
so as to estimate the complexity of the project
for the productive system.
The first two weekends in August 2008 were
selected far in advance as the optimum date
for migration of the productive system. This
choice was necessitated by the fact that the
service contracts for the SAP systems were
due to expire. In addition, Demag Cranes AG
requires monthly business statements, so no
system downtime could be tolerated.
Pleasantly surprised
In December 2008, the results of the migra-
tion could not yet be finally quantified. But
Andreas Rogge believes an analysis of the
results achieved so far speaks for itself:
“We were amazed at what the hardware could
suddenly do. We currently have much more
hardware operating than we could ever have
run in the HP-UX environment, or should
have run given the sluggishness of the system.
In terms of CPU load, our systems are more
underloaded than overloaded at the present
time.”
And there were other indicators that the IT
department had made the right strategic
decision. The dialog response time, which
used to be two or three seconds, was reduced
by 90% and is now less than 300 microseconds.
The runtimes for backups have also been
reduced by as much as 90% in some cases,
although the total time required to perform
backups remains about the same. No errors
have occurred in terms of the high availability
of the database, as is confirmed by failover
tests. Overall, the new flexibility, reliability
and performance of the IT landscape exceeded
all expectations–and at significantly reduced
costs.
36

S A P O N O R A C L E 1 0 g R A C AT G E R M A N T E L E K O M
Translation of Computerwoche (IDG)
– BY WOLFRAM HERRMANN
AUGUST 18, 2008

Source:
http://www.computerwoche.de/knowledge_center/open_source/1871078/

Deutsche Telekom transfers core applications
to Linux
The telecoms giant based in Bonn (Germany)
has migrated its revenue management system
- one of the world’s largest SAP installations -
to an Intel server running on the Linux open
source operating system.
Deutsche Telekom is making more use of Linux
platforms for its business-critical applications
through its own in-house IT service provider
T-Systems. “We are pursuing the strategy of
automating and industrializing as many parts
of our processes as possible,” explains Christoph
Böhm, who is responsible for the operation
and technical infrastructure of accounting
systems. “Linux puts us in a much better
position to achieve this goal as it makes us
completely manufacturer-independent.”
Intel servers run on SUSE Linux
Deutsche Telekom reached a milestone in its
strategy by migrating its revenue management
to the open source operating system. To this
end the company uses the SAP software
RM-CA (SAP Revenue Management – Contract
Accounting). The server platforms are provided
by x86 computers from Fujitsu-Siemens
Computers running SUSE Linux and the Oracle
10g RAC database. The revenue management
and almost all corporate customers are billed
by the telecoms provider in Germany. The
only exceptions are major corporate accounts
with special cost center structures, which were
mapped in separate systems. The accounting
system processes around 500 million payment
transactions a year for about 40 million custo-
mer accounts.
Linux migrations plan in 2005
In 2005, Deutsche Telekom started by drawing
up an overall concept for all its accounting
application systems. For the IT strategists,
the key questions were: Which systems can be
migrated to Linux and when? Which systems
must keep running on a Unix derivative
because their manufacturers do not yet support
Linux? “It became clear that about a third of
the systems we currently use are not yet
Linux-capable,” says Böhm. This was mainly
true of special applications (see also “How
Linux is pushing out the Unix system”).

All other applications were migrated to the
open source operating system, a process which
is still underway. One of the biggest migration
projects was revenue management. Between
2001 and 2004 the IT team consolidated 15
previously regional systems on a single plat-
form. As part of the process, the company
replaced 15 Unix-based hardware platforms
with a high-performance cluster of 130
SPARC 4+ processors from Sun Microsystems.
Böhm explains, “Since this platform was crea-
ting enormous amortization costs, T-Systems
developed a dynamic usage-based hosting
concept that we switched to after the amor-
tization period for the old Unix environment
came to an end.”
In this case, dynamic means that the IT service
provider charges for processing power and
memory based on actual usage. Deutsche
Telekom says that this results in cost savings.
The company also states that T-Systems mana-
ged to accelerate batch processing by 20%.
“The processing power available with Linux
allows us to process revenue management
steps between 20% and 40% faster,”says Böhm.
“For our 5,000 concurrent SAP users, we
achieve average response times of just over
two seconds.”
C o m p u t e r w o c h e ( I D G ) a r t i c l e S A P o n R A C a t G e r m a n Te l e k o m 37
Major step from Unix to Linux
The migration project was not wholly without
problems, as the IT manager admits. “When a
hosting provider migrates an application the
size of the Deutsche Telekom revenue manage-
ment system to a Linux platform, it inevitably
experiences a learning curve. After all, it is
operating in new territory compared with
familiar Unix systems and even smaller Linux
systems.” T-Systems completed the learning
phase quickly, and the in-house IT service
provider says it now operates over 60% of its
‘Dynamic Services’ on Linux systems.
However, even Deutsche Telekom's technical
experts had to rethink at one point. In early
2007 they put the business process logic to the
test. Böhm explains, “We used the scheduled
system changeover to improve a large number
of process steps. Today the business process
demands only about 40% of the resources we
needed before the optimization.”
IT history of Deutsche Telekom
The formerly peripheral SAP installations are
the result of Deutsche Telekom’s IT history.
In the early 1990s the company built a network
of 15 SAP accounting systems running IBM's
Unix derivative AIX, each of which covered a
different region in Germany. Those in charge
of IT explain that this was because, at the time,
the hardware did not offer enough scalability.
However, data integration frequently resulted
in unacceptably high costs, for example when
customers moved or relocated. The numerous
changes required over the years also increased
maintenance costs.
 38
Indian Express Group
Industry:
Media
Geography:
India
Challenge:
To transform existing legacy
infrastructure into a future-ready
solution, while protecting
existing investments, and
giving the group the foundation
to accelerate cost effectively
Migration Path:
Novell Netware 3.12 OS to
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5
Software:
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5
with Oracle 10g database and
Real Application Clusters
Hardware:
Dell PowerEdge 1900, 2800
and 2900 Server series,
64-bit Intel Xeon processors
Benefits:
The implementation of Red Hat
Enterprise Linux 5 has given
Indian Express a highly availab-
le, secure, and reliable platform
with freedom from vendor lock-
in, and the ability to scale cost-
effectively without sub-sequent
investments in hardware.
“Our top priority was to ensure uniformity, standardization, and compatibility of operations,
while building the IT foundation for us to accelerate quickly in the future without any limits —
either imposed by technology or the vendor.”
– TRIDIB BORDOLOI,
CIO, Indian Express Group.
SAP ON ORACLE 10g RAC: INDIAN EXPRESS CHOOSES
R E D H AT S O L U T I O N S T O T R A N S F O R M I T S L E G A C Y
I N F R A S T R U C T U R E I N T O A F U T U R E - R E A D Y P L AT F O R M
Background publish content quickly, without compromising
on quality. Over the years, to gain a competi-
The Indian Express group is one of India’s
tive advantage, the group had deployed a
most well-known media firms, with several
diverse mix of software and hardware, leading
popular publications to its credit. The group
to a prevalence of islands of information,
owns The Indian Express, which continues
numerous point-to-point interfaces, and
to push the boundaries of excellence in investi-
inconsistent business processes.
gative journalism and uses the slogan “Journa-
lism of Courage.” The group also owns other
The group’s backbone LAN servers were
newspapers in India including the Financial
powered by Novell Netware 3.12 OS with the
Express, a business newspaper focused on the
limitation of client licenses; while for its mes-
Indian economy; Marathi language daily
saging needs the group used .cc:Mail 8.2.
Loksatta; Hindi language daily Jansatta; and
These applications were impacting the group’s
Screen, a tabloid focused on the Indian
agility in an industry where speed is of critical
entertainment industry.
importance, and were proving to be complex
and expensive to maintain. It was clear to
Challenge the group that it needed to evaluate a solution
that would not only meet existing needs cost-
The India media industry is extremely com-
effectively, but give the group the reliability
petitive, and is constantly adapting to cater to
it needed for the future.
changing consumer demands and technological
developments. In late 2004, even as the Indian
“Our top priority was to ensure uniformity,
Express group was establishing new bench-
standardization, and compatibility of opera-
marks in journalism, it was grappling to cost
tions, while building the IT foundation for us
effectively scale up its IT infrastructure.
to accelerate quickly in the future without any
limits — either imposed by technology or the
As a national-level newspaper, the Express
vendor,” said Tridib Bordoloi, CIO, Indian
group operates across more than 19 locations Express Group.
in the country, and needed a robust IT infra-
structure that would give it the ability to

Solution
While assessing the right infrastructure to
power its future growth, four important con-
siderations were made. “In the media industry,
we cannot afford to have a downtime. Hence,
high availability is a critical need. We also
evaluated platforms with respect to the TCO,
future readiness, and ability to scale,” said
Bordoloi.
In the end, the decision was made quickly
due to the team’s familiarity with Red Hat
Enterprise Linux, having used the platform
effectively for running its file and print
servers. In fact, almost every member of the
IT team in the group is trained on using and
implementing Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
The group planned a series of modernization
initiatives with Linux at the heart. The group
implemented SAP on Red Hat Enterprise
Linux 5 to streamline business processes,
gain complete control, and achieve informa-
tion transparency across the country. The
Express group has deployed four SAP modu-
les, which includes Material management,
Media Advertisement Management, Finance
and Control, and Media Sales and Distribution.
“The selection of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5
was an obvious choice, as it fulfilled all the
requirements we envisioned for building a
future-ready platform. We are all for open
standards, and did not want to be tied down
to a single vendor. Red Hat gives us the flexi-
bility to change to a different hardware plat-
form, if necessary,” said Bordoloi.
Further, with SAP certifying Red Hat Enter-
prise Linux 5, the Express Group is ensured
that all the criteria necessary for full interopera-
bility of Red Hat solutions with all modules
of SAP are in compliance.
Oracle 10g RAC for SAP at Indian Express Group 39
Benefits
With ease of use, protecting existing invest-
ments, and the ability to scale cost-effectively
without subsequent investments in hardware,
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 has given the
Indian Express group the ability to move for-
ward with its business goals without any
technology constraints. Like any other national
newspaper, the smooth transfer of stories and
pages within the organization, across locations
is vital. Today, a complete workflow enables
this while integrating agency feeds, and has
the added ability to accommodate last-minute
breaking news without compromising on
quality of printing.
“ With the Express Group
“In addition to high availability and reliabi- always upholding the
lity, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 gives us values of free dom of
access to features such as clustering and vituali- media, it is like open source
zation that would otherwise have been possible meeting open minds.”
through the purchase of additional third-party
solutions,” explained Bordoloi. – Tridib Bordoloi, CIO,
Indian Express Group.
The group uses Oracle Real Application
Clusters (RAC) 10g as the database, with
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 as the plat-
form. This combination provides the group
increased flexibility and significantly
reduced operational costs. For example,
the Express Group can now dynamically
provision nodes, storage, or CPUs to lower
costs and improve utilization.
“With the combination of cost, flexibility, and
reliability, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 has
truly exceeded our expectations.When compa-
red to contemporary solutions, the TCO is very
low. More importantly, Red Hat‘s security fea-
tures enabled through the Security-Enhanced
Linux (SELinux) functionality, has given us
peace of mind, vis-à-vis other platforms that
are facing new vulnerabilities and threats
almost every day,” said Bordoloi.
40
What is also special about the Indian Express
Group is that the group is a trendsetter in
usage of open source technologies in India.
From mail servers, file servers, SAP, and even
the company’s website, the group uses Red
Hat Enterprise Linux at the backend. The list
of accolades doesn’t stop here. “The Indian
Express Group happens to be one of the ear-
liest users of SAP on RAC in the region,”
said Bordoloi.
The Indian Express group has streamlined
its editorial operations, across all publications
pan India, by implementing NewsWrap edito-
rial system developed by 4C Plus (breaking
from the decade old foxpro/DOS legacy). This
integrated system is a complete workflow en-
compassing all aspects of editorial operations.
It captures feeds from all sources including
agencies, bureaus etc and flows them to the
relevant QuarkXpress pages where, advertise-
ment page-plan is already available to them to
work on.
The advertisement page planning is done
using Layout-X page planning system, also
from 4Cplus. Layout-X has been seamlessly
integrated with SAP IS/MAM and NewsWrap.
“The Express Group has always been on the
forefront of publishing high-quality articles
that can positively change the society we live
in. Hence, when it was revealed in a recent
Network World test that Red Hat Enterprise
Linux was named the Greenest Operating
System, pulling as much as 12 percent less
power than Windows 2008 on identical
hardware, we were overjoyed with our choice
and the small contribution we are making to
make the world a better place to live in,”
said Bordoloi.
Layout-X picks up the advts scheduled on a
given day for an edition and the ad dummy
(page plan) is made on the fly. Manual overrides
exist to finalize the page plan suggested by
Layout-X. The page plans are available to the
editorial as per the page release deadlines. In
case of exigencies, if the page plan needs to be
altered, then online notifications are sent to
editorial users to update the page accordingly.
The final advertisement placement positions
are picked up and updated to SAP IS/MAM
for ad invoicing.
Both these utilities mentioned above has
Oracle 10g as database and RHEL 5x as the
platform.
 42

“Our new system architecture based on Oracle database 10g and Oracle Real Application
Clusters combines performance and reliability. We have received positive feedback from
users and have been able to enhance customer service.”

– SPOKESPERSON, ASE GROUP

ASE TURNS TO NEW SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE TO

ENHANCE PERFORMANCE AND SERVICE QUALITY

ASE Group
Kaohsiung, Taiwan
www.aseglobal.com
Industry:
High Technology
Annual Revenue:
US$303 million
Employees:
13,000
Oracle Products & Services:
Oracle database
Oracle Real Application Clusters
Key Benefits:
• Improved use of hardware
resources, including enhanced
return on secondary equip-
ment
• Gained ability to seamlessly
add new hardware nodes to
increase capacity without
affecting system availability
• Reduced IT management,
maintenance, and operational
workload through online
archiving and data reorganiza-
tion
The ASE Group is the world’s largest provider
of independent semiconductor manufacturing
test and assembly services. The group’s soluti-
ons include integrated circuit test program
design, front-end engineering testing, wafer
probe, wafer bump, substrate design and sup-
ply, wafer level package, flip chip, system-
inpackage, and final test and design
manufacturing services.
ASE Group’s global deployment capabilities
provide it with a significant advantage over
its competitors. The organization’s flagship
company, ASE Kaohsiung, operates a plant in
Taiwan’s second largest city that contributes
more than 60% of the group’s overall revenues.
In 2007, ASE Kaohsiung implemented a new
database based on Oracle database 10g with
Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) to
support an enterprise resource planning
deployment and resolve a range of system
problems. These included performance
bottlenecks and difficulties in file archiving.
The migration from a high availability
hardware architecture to Oracle RAC has
enhanced performance and management capa-
bilities and improved investment returns at
the plant.
An ASE Group spokesperson said: “Our new
system architecture based on Oracle database
10g and Oracle RAC combines performance
and reliability.”
“We have received positive feedback from
users and have been able to enhance customer
service.”
Sales Growth Demands Improved
IT Performance
The ASE Group operates across a host of loca-
tions worldwide. Taiwan facilities include the
Kaohsiung plant and an operation at Chung
Li that provides comprehensive semiconductor
manufacturing services.
The organization differentiates itself from its
competitors by providing an integrated service
across a single supply chain. By providing
front-end testing and design, wafer probing,
package design, substrate design and manu-
facture, package service, product testing, and
system assembly, ASE Group has helped custo-
mers reduce processing periods and ensure high
product yield and reliability. This performance
has prompted significant sales growth but
increased the complexity of shipping require-
ments. Every lot produced by the ASE Group
is non-standard and requires different packing
based on the instructions and requirements of
individual customers.

The ASE Kaohsiung plant ships product almost
365 days every year. Each shipment triggers a
range of processes in accounting and other
relevant components of the plant’s enterprise
resource planning system. However, the volume
of data generated caused a range of problems,
including deficiencies in the accuracy of data-
archiving and frequent performance issues
sparked by bottlenecks.
ASE Kaohsiung realized that expanding its
server hardware to accommodate this surging
demand would impose a heavy financial bur-
den on the business. The plant had run its
enterprise resource planning system and data-
base on a high availability architecture that
spanned production and backup servers. The
two node system operated as an active/passive
cluster, with the backup server remaining
online but not providing applications or
services to end users.
When first implementing the enterprise
resource planning system in 2004, ASE
Kaohsiung deployed Oracle database to under-
take system management. However, with the
original architecture unable to accommodate
the surge in data, ASE Kaohsiung opted to
undertake a comprehensive upgrade spanning
both the database and the enterprise resource
planning system.
After purchasing the required hardware, ASE
Kaohsiung installed the latest version of its
enterprise resource planning system and Oracle
database 10g with Oracle RAC.
Strengthening Database Maintenance
and Operation
ASE Kaohsiung has started the performance
improvement delivered by Oracle RAC as well
as the flexibility of the new technical frame-
work and the features of Oracle database 10g.
“The enhanced management and online fea-
tures of the new database have reduced and
simplified the workload of our database admini-
strators,” said the spokesperson.
O r a c l e 1 0 g R A C f o r S A P a t A S E Ta i w a n 43
Previously, ASE Kaohsiung’s information
technology staff had to undertake reorganiza-
tion and filing tasks manually and offline so
as not to interrupt production systems. A tool
provided with Oracle database 10g enables
online file archiving, reducing staff workloads.
Users are among the most enthusiastic advo-
cates of the system upgrade and architecture
change project, thanks to improved perfor-
mance and response times.
“The new environment built with Oracle
database 10g and Oracle RAC has success-
fully accomplished this mission,” said the “Our new system
spokesperson.
architecture based on
Oracle database 10g
Why Oracle?
and Oracle RAC
ASE commenced the upgrade project in
combines performance
January 2007. The project, spanning an and reliability.”
enterprise resource planning system, a data-
base upgrade, and implementation of Oracle
RAC, was completed by the end of July. – Spokesperson,
The new system commenced operations on ASE Group.
1 August.
The organization selected Oracle database 10g
due to the status of Oracle database as a key
platform for the business. Oracle database is
also the industry-leading brand with the hig-
hest market share. These factors prompted
ASE to make its decision without evaluating
rival solutions.
“We selected Oracle RAC as it is a mature
product and delivers a range of key features,”
said the spokesperson.
At present, Oracle database 10g and Oracle
RAC are only deployed at ASE Kaohsiung,
while other ASE business divisions have their
own systems. “Based on the excellent perfor-
mance of Oracle RAC, we expect to duplicate
the environment at these businesses,” said the
spokesperson.
44 O r a c l e 1 0 g R A C f o r S A P a t A S E Ta i w a n
Implementation Process
As part of the project, ASE Kaohsiung spent
six months undertaking proof of concept to
identify how to maximize system performance.
With assistance from Oracle, the plant worked
out how to maximize its return on investment.
The new environment started operations on
August 1, 2007. Oracle RAC successfully
replaced the original high availability environ-
ment and enabled the plant to better exploit
its hardware resources.
“In the old high availability architecture, we
had bought two systems but used only one for
production, leaving the other standing by as a
passive server,” said the spokesperson. “After
implementing Oracle RAC, we can exploit
the potential of both systems because they
run at the same time. More importantly, we
have enhanced performance.”
ASE Kaohsiung is also excited about the
scalability of Oracle RAC as information
technology managers can add hardware nodes
into the cluster to increase capacity without
compromising system availability. The ability
of Oracle’s RAC software to support multiple
hardware platforms also extends the options
available to ASE Kaohsiung.
ASE Kaohsiung is the flagship operation of
semiconductor manufacturing test and assembly
specialist ASE Group. The ASE Kaohsiung plant
houses the group’s R&D center and operates world-
class assembly, wafer bumping, and test services.
ASE Kaohsiung provides full turnkey services,
including substrate design and manufacturing
capabilities.
 46

“After being implemented incredibly quickly, stability and scalability have improved and we
can upgrade SAP and releases much faster than before with less administration effort.
What a great overall result.”

– ZORAN STRLJIC,
Project Manager and SAP Basis Team Leader at
Diehl Informatik GmbH.

S A P A N D O R A C L E R E A L A P P L I C AT I O N C L U S T E R S
Informatik ( R A C ) O N W I N D O W S AT D I E H L I N F O R M AT I K

DIEHL Informatik

Industry/business area:
Consultancy and operating
company working with infor-
mation and communication
systems, a member of the
Diehl group
dd
Workforce:
85 at Diehl Informatik,
11,000 in the Diehl group
Oracle products:
• Oracle 10g RAC for SAP
• Oracle database 10.2.0.2
• MCOD on RAC
Benefits achieved:
• Greater stability
• Better scalability, fewer servers
• Less administration,
faster release update
• Improved system expandability
• Future-proof system
SAP:
• Business Suite (ECC6.0)
• SAP BI
• CRM
• NetWeaver 2004s
• MCOD
• Solution Manager
Infrastructure:
• FSC PRIMERGY BX620S4
(Intel Quad-Core)
• MS Windows Server 2003
• NetApp iSCSI cluster
Profile: DIEHL Informatik AG
As a consultancy and operating company
working with information and communication
systems, DIEHL Informatik provides assistance
to other companies within the Diehl group and
external industrial, commercial and service
companies. DIEHL Informatik employs 85 staff
members and works in the fields of corporate
consulting, management information systems,
corporate systems (SAP®), e-business systems,
electronic archiving systems, PC systems,
Internet/Intranet services, system integration,
system management and operation, telecom-
munication, IT security, training and hardware-
/software distribution. www.diehl-informatik.de
The Diehl group is based in Nuremberg. The
global technology firm is organized into the
four divisions of Metal, Controls, Defense and
Aerosystems. With a workforce of around
11,000, it has an annual turnover of €2.2
billion.
Facing challenges head on
Prompted by the substantial effort involved in
upgrading and maintaining SAP systems both
internally and externally, the company started
to look into how this administrative task could
be efficiently optimized in the long term. The
first attempt to cap administration complexity
for several SAP systems was the introduction
of SAP MCOD (Multiple Components in One
Database), which allows data for several SAP
Basis systems to be stored in one physical
Oracle database. However this approach brings
with it the risk of the several SAP systems no
longer being available should the database
server fail. So the company started to look
for a way of making this MCOD architecture
highly available.
The company also wanted to equip itself for
future tasks and further enhance scalability,
performance, and the general stability of its
systems.
Traditional high-availability concepts usually
require the number of servers to be doubled
which makes administration work more
complex and error-prone. The company did
not want to go down this path. Instead, as a
satisfied Oracle database customer, it found
the ideal solution for its requirements in
Oracle RAC (Real Application Clusters).
To get straight to the point, with Oracle RAC
the company achieved greater stability, which
was easy to administer, and through load
distribution over several database nodes,
scalability was greatly enhanced. Diehl
Informatik is now even able to manage more
systems than before with its existing admin
team. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Several birds with one stone
How was this special situation approached?
The medium-sized SAP ERP system in the
Defense division (ECC 6.0, 700 named users,
Oracle 10g database, MS Windows Server
2003) needed preparing for expansion to SAP
Business Suite using Unicode with SAP BI
and SAP CRM. Oracle RAC was intended to
make this SAP MCOD system more stable.
However, it just so happened that the IT was
being moved to a new data center and the
existing old multi-server landscape was being
replaced with new powerful PRIMERGY
BX620S4 Intel quad-core blade servers from
Fujitsu Siemens Computers. The storage
landscape was also being equipped with
modern NetApp FAS3070 clusters on iSCSI
Ethernet.
Upgrading SAP, introducing Oracle RAC and
renewing the infrastructure – there were a lot
of changes taking place at the same time. But
the staff working with Zoran Strljic, Team
Leader and Project Manager for SAP Basis at
Diehl Informatik was not at all worried.
Through their thorough preparations and by
taking on a very experienced RAC/SAP im-
plementation partner, Mr. Lenard Buday from
LNW-Soft GmbH, the team managed to
implement the SAP productive system with
4 instances on 2 Oracle RAC database nodes
within just 8 weeks. This also included SAP
release updates on all test and productive
systems and moving the system to the new
servers! A rather fast result all round.
The admin team led by Mr. Fischer confirms
that the system has now been running
“smoothly and very stably” since July 2008.
Experience to date and benefits achieved
If we consider the time to implement just
RAC (i.e. not including SAP release and hard-
ware infrastructure server updates), this took
just 6 weeks. This was shorter than expected
and there were no problems along the way.
Oracle 10g RAC at DIEHL Informatik 47
In day-to-day operations, greatly improved
stability has been noted, as have the additional
benefits of Oracle RAC. This includes an
outstanding level of scalability because other
database nodes can be quickly and easily added
as load requirements increase. Flexibility in
allocating SAP instances, MCOD areas and
processes to particular Oracle RAC database
nodes has also improved. And last but not
least, less administration work is required
“Oracle RAC has
compared with traditional methods to increase
stability. Faster upgrade times have also far surpassed our
resulted from combining this system with expectations!
new hardware. It’s improving our
Through the time that the admin team now sustainability and
saves, it can even support more SAP systems, competitiveness
which is a key cost and productivity factor. too.”
This means that new functions can be made
available to SAP end users even faster and more – Zoran Strljic,
reliably than before. Project Manager and SAP
Basis Team Leader at
As a result of these very positive experiences, Diehl Informatik GmbH.
the company is considering implementing
other SAP applications such as SCM, APO
(in this case the Oracle database without Life-
cache) and PLM with its own engines in the
near future, again on Oracle RAC.
Improved sustainability
The Diehl Informatik SAP team have reported
that all in all Oracle RAC results in improved
sustainability and allows the company to
respond faster and more flexibly to new
challenges. The result is perfectly in line with
a dynamic form of IT offering cost-efficient and
reliable support for the company’s new goals.
48
Bauerfeind AG + Projekt
www.bauerfeind.com
Industry:
Manufacturer of medical aids
(compression stockings sup-
ports orthoses, orthopedic
insoles and shoes, prosthetic
components and materials)
Workforce:
1800 worldwide
Oracle Products:
Oracle 10.2.0.2 database,
size 2TB before Index Key
Compression
Key Benefits:
significant database size
reduction by 15%, index
reduction 50%, high quality,
very fast implementation in
2 weeks, enabling future
growth, professional project
support by Oracle
SAP:
40 central Systems, ERP
(ECC6.0), Internet Sales 5.0,
CRM 4.0, NetWeaver 2004s,
BI 7.0, CO, GTS, all modules
activ
Infrastructure:
IBM Power 5 / JS22 Blade
Power6, AIX 5.3 TL7 / 6.1 SP2,
LPAR’s uncapped
“Oracle Index Key Compression is an amazing way of achieving tangible database optimization
with minimal effort. The professional support from the Oracle/SAP Global Technology Center
helped us to complete the project in a very short space of time and secure future growth.
Our expectations were satisfied in every way!”
– ALEXANDER KÄFERLEIN,
”MOTION IS LIFE – ORACLE INDEX KEY
C O M P R E S S I O N AT B A U E R F E I N D “
Profile: Bauerfeind AG
Bauerfeind AG is one of the leading manu-
facturers of medical aids such as compression
stockings, supports, orthoses, orthopaedic
insoles and prosthetic components. It also
supplies the associated measuring systems.
The midsize family business, founded in
Zeulenroda, Germany in 1929, employs around
1800 people at three sites in Germany as well
as 15 subsidiaries in Europe, the Middle East
and the U.S.
The company’s motto, “Motion is life”, also
reveals its strong commitment to regional and
international sports. Top athletes around the
world rely on the superb quality of Bauerfeind
products. In 2008, Europe’s most successful
stair racer won the race to climb the 2,046
steps of one of the world’s tallest buildings,
Taipei 101, wearing medical compression
stockings. The company has been an official
supplier to the German Olympic teams since
2001, offering an accompanying orthopaedic
service that has been also taken to Beijing.
The preferred choice of top athletes is available
to everyone, because Bauerfeind products are
available from quality medical supplies retai-
lers.
www.bauerfeind.com
Data Centre/SAP Basis Manager at Bauerfeind AG
Tradition meets innovation
Innovation has a tradition at Bauerfeind. The
knowledge and experience the company has
acquired from working with patients and
athletes in its Innovation Center, opened in
1999, find direct practical application in the
optimization and development of new
products. In keeping with the motto “IT
drives business”, the IT department plays a
major role in the market success of Bauerfeind
products.
After being confronted with the problem of
operating multiple sites and different IT
systems as a result of continual growth, the
company decided in 2002, when Bauerfeind
AG was being founded, to consolidate using a
standard SAP ERP solution at the central site
in Zeulenroda. There are now over 40 systems
with almost all modules (including GTS,
CRM Mobile Sales and BI). In addition to an
IBM AIX infrastructure, the company was
soon convinced of the advantages of the Oracle
database as the central company standard.
Managing growth
It goes without saying that an internationally
very successful midsize company will experi-
ence constant data growth. In early 2008 the
company was faced with managing a data
volume of around 2 TB in what was one of the
largest local Oracle databases. In relative terms

this may not be huge (some companies manage
up to 20 TB and the figure is constantly
growing), but a growth of around 2 GB per
week, plus a marked increase in backup and
recovery times, prompted Alexander Käferlein,
Data Centre/SAP Base Manager and his team
to start thinking about optimization. The team
also wanted a leaner database to minimize
export/import times prior to a planned switch
to Unicode.
A solution was soon found for the backup issue.
By improving parallelization it was possible to
cut backup times from 11 hours to 4.5 hours.
It still remained to minimize the considerable
recovery time of almost 8 hours. With the
help of SDN (SAP Developer Network) and
some useful contacts at the SAP/Oracle
Technology Center in Walldorf, the answer
was soon found: Oracle Index Key Compression.
Oracle Index Key Compression – the way to
optimization
Oracle is the only database manufacturer to
offer not only database table optimization
but also, since Oracle8, index key compression
on Linux/Unix/Windows operating systems.
As the name suggests, the process involves
removing duplicated values from the index
entries (index blocks) – an important method
for saving disk space and improving perfor-
mance (see page 13 this edition). The process
is completely transparent with no maintenance
requirements.
In an SAP environment, indexes usually
account for around 50% to 60% of table size
and 30% to 40% of the total database, so it
is possible to reduce the total data size by
20% to 30%. Within the index table,
reductions can be up to 75% – a very
considerable factor. A database of 10 TB, for
example, could be reduced by up to 3 TB,
with enormous benefits in terms of disk space,
backup, update and recovery.
Oracle Index Key Compression at Bauerfeind 49
Rapid implementation and clear benefits
After consulting with SAP about the approval
and usability of Oracle Index Key Compression,
a pilot project for the largest database in the
ERP, BI and CRM system got underway in
February 2008. For the first customers of a new
function, SAP usually specifies the procedure
for the pilot project. As a result of the positive
experience acquired with over 100 customers,
SAP has since issued GA status (general availa-
bility and approval).
During the Bauerfeind pilot project the custo- “Oracle Index Key Com-
mer was in direct contact (by phone and e-mail)
pression is an amazing
with the Oracle/SAP development team in
way of achieving tangible
Walldorf. The team also provided predefined
database optimization
scripts, which the customer could quickly
adapt to its own particular requirements and with minimal effort.“
system landscape. Oracle helped with the
optimization and review of reports. However, – Alexander Käferlein,
no additional advice or services were needed Data Centre / SAP Basis
on site. Manager at Bauerfeind AG.
According to Alexander Käferlein, the
support provided by Oracle was outstan-
ding, with useful tips and very fast, almost
real-time responses.
The project was successfully completed in just
two weeks. All in all, the effort invested was
minimal in relation to the benefits gained.
What were the results?
Starting point in early 2008: Largest database
in SAP ERP–around 2 TB. 3-4 CPUs alloca-
ted. Recovery time 8 hours.
50
After the selection of around 400 suitable
“index candidates” and the launch of the
scripts, it was possible to compress the
index range by an average of 40% to 50%!
This had the effect of shrinking the database
from 2 TB to 1.7 TB, or by 300 GB = 15%
(see chart).
Tables such as DBTABLOG (120 GB) and
COEP (47 GB) are examples of good index
compression. The index portion of DBTABLOG
shrank from 23 GB/17 GB to 15 GB/6 GB,
a reduction of 35% to 65%. In the case of
COEP the index was actually pared down
from 8 GB/6 GB to 2 GB/1 GB, a reduction
of 75% to 84%!
Examples tab
SAP ERP Index before
DBTABLOG A 23GB
B 17GB
COEP A 8GB
B 6GB
In addition, the CPU load in the AIX LPAR
virtualization was reduced by one half CPU.
These significant results have had a positive
impact on day-to-day operations, the
maintainability of the entire system, response
times, space requirements, and backup and
recovery times. The primary benefactor is day-
to-day international business in the offices and
factories connected to the system.
Future with Oracle
The very positive experience and rapid
practical benefits achieved with Oracle Index
Key Compression have encouraged Alexander
Käferlein’s team to make more extensive use
of the technology, especially in SAP BI and
the upcoming SAP conversion to Unicode at
the end of 2008.
In 2009 Bauerfeind is also planning to
introduce another innovative Oracle database
option to further improve the high availability
of the entire system: Oracle RAC.
With first-class Oracle database functionality,
quality and support to hand, the planned
go-live is sure to be a success.
After Index reduction
15GB 35%
6GB 65%
2GB 75%
1GB 84%
 52

COST REDUCTION OF STORAGE THROUGH ORACLE

TABLE COMPRESSION
Capcom has selected the Oracle database based on its excellent reliability for SAP BI/BW

Capcom uses table compression to solve the Mr. Kazuhito Mizuno

problem of increased data due to the use of
SAP BI/BW system, and has reduced the cost
by approx. 40%.
Capcom Co., Ltd.
http://www.capcom.co.jp/ Capcom Company is continuing to grow by
developing and selling home game software as
its core operations. The company has adopted
the SAP ERP as its mission-critical system,
and it uses the SAP to analyze various types
of data and reflect them on the company’s
management. Capcom has adopted the Oracle
database to support those system operations.
We spoke with Mr. Kazuhito Mizuno, Chief of
System Infrastructure Team of Capcom’s IT
Integration Information System Department,
about the adoption of the Oracle database, the
major problems that will be faced, their
solution, and future prospects.
Capcom adopted the Oracle database based
on its excellent reliability.
Capcom has adopted the SAP ERP as its mis-
sion-critical system, and this system is running
on the Windows server with the Oracle
database. Mr. Mizuno explains why Capcom
uses the Oracle database for SAP ERP.
“It was because an opinion of easy system
management arose in the company. However,
Capcom considered the applications for
mission-critical systems and finally selected
the Oracle database because it has the same
level of reliability as the server.
People believe that the Oracle database is
appropriate for a mission-critical system (on
server). Recently, however, the reliability and
versatility of Windows servers have been
improved, and it is common to construct a
mission-critical system using a Windows server.
Capcom attached a high value to the reliability
of the database and decided to continue using
the Oracle database because the company uses
the Windows server to run the SAP ERP, that
is, its mission-critical system.”

“I attach high value to the selection of the data-

base myself. The database needs to have a
certain level of performance if it is used for
a system, like the mission-critical system, for Mr. Kazuhito Mizuno
which there is the highest demand for relia-
bility. Although there are several options for
selecting a database for SAP ERP, the Oracle
database is the only choice with a higher
reliability and fine tuning for the database.”

Limited storage capacity is a problem
in SAP BI/BW operation.
Capcom adopted the SAP BI/BW as its
business intelligence tool in 2003, and it is
mainly used for management accounting and
for business administration. It is also used for
marketing, including area-difference analysis
of the company’s market share for their-
popular products. This is also running on the
Windows server and the Oracle database.
However, a problem arises in the limited
storage capacity of data. The company certainly
knows that the amount of analysis data in-
creases and the storage capacity is exhausted
if a business intelligence tool such as SAP
BI/BW is used. When installing the system,
Capcom determined to review the storage
capacity after a year, and assigned 250 giga-
bytes of storage area to the SAP BW for the
first year. After one year, the company studied
the expansion of storage to deal with the in-
creased data that occurred as expected. With
in this time, however, Capcom did not decide
to expand the storage. “Recently, the price of
storage systems dropped and it is much easier
for us to install a storage system than before.
However, we were suspicious about solving the
problem by simply expanding storage capacity.
We needed to back up data as it is used on
our mission-critical system. In fact, if the
storage capacity increases and the data amount
increases accordingly, our tasks surely increase
in the system operation phase and our cost of
backup tapes also increases. Although the
system installation cost dropped, we concluded
that we should carefully expand our storage
capacity by taking a longterm view.”
O r a c l e Ta b l e C o m p r e s s i o n a t C a p c o m 53
Capcom use table compression function
to deal with the increase of data.
So how did Capcom solve the issue of data
increase? Actually, when Capcom studied the
issue of data increase, Oracle Japan proposed
“table compression,” one of Oracle database’s
functions. This is a solution to reduce data
by compressing it and using storage more
efficiently. This approach is completely different
from the expansion of storage. At that time, “Capcom attached a
Mr. Mizuno listened to this proposal with high value to the
both concerns and hopes: reliability of the
“Maybe, it was my fixed concept that the
database and decided
‘compression’ was advantageous for the issue
to continue using the
of data capacity but it could also increase the
Oracle database
CPU load and drop the response. But when
I heard the details, I found that data table because the company
compression was completed within the Oracle uses the Windows
database and, therefore, did not increase the server to run the
CPU load. Even the system response might SAP ERP, that is,
increase in certain applications. As an engineer, its missioncritical
I became curious about this proposal.” system.”
Later, Capcom adopted the data compression – Kazuhito Mizuno,
solution and the data compression was actually Capcom Co., Ltd.
used. A key point in table compression is the
determination of data compression rate. The
system response varies depending on how well
the compression rate is tuned. So, Oracle Japan
verified the basic part of data compression.
Oracle prepared three machines such as a
development server, an evaluation server, and
a real operation server. Oracle tried data com-
pression in different ratio patterns.
Also, Hewlett-Packard Japan, supported this
project and the verification was made very
smoothly. Capcom could start the actual
system operation after approximately one
month.
54
System Environment
The data was reduced to approx. 60% as
a result of data compression.
After conducting various types of verification,
Capcom found that the data compression of
the top five tables only is most effective in
SAP BI/BW operation. As a result of data
compression, the entire data was reduced to
approximately 60%. A total of 40% of
storage was released. Although some data
could be compressed much more, Capcom
skipped the data compression if it was
meaningless in system operation. Because four
years have passed since the start of data
compression, the storage has increased to 400
gigabytes today. However, when you consider
the flow of data increase and if Capcom did
not select the data compression, a terabyte-
class capacity storage would be required
today. Based on this result, Mr. Mizuno feels
the introduction of data compression function
as follows:
“We have expanded the storage accordingly,
but the current storage is limited to 400
gigabytes only. It means our data compression
is highly effective. Also, we are very satisfied
that none of our customers have claimed a
drop in system response.”
Both SAP and Oracle database plan an
upgrade.
Capcom is planning to upgrade the SAP
ERP System to SAP ECC and the SAP
BW to SAP BI 7.0. At the same time, the
current Oracle9i database will be upgraded
to Oracle database 10g. Their current criti-
cal missions are smooth upgrading of these
systems and continuation of data compres-
sion after their upgrading. Aside from this,
Capcom wishes to establish some kind of
disaster recovery environment. For the
efforts expected of Oracle Corp. Japan,
Mr. Mizuno says the following:
“Yes, this data compression is a good
example. An advantage of the Oracle data-
base is the availability of the appropriate
function to implement ‘something’ that
you wish to perform. You can tune up the
database if you take an action. But I feel
those advantageous functions have not yet
been introduced to the public. I do hope
Oracle provides this information by pre-
sentation and advertising. It is also good if
Oracle provides detailed information that
executives can easily understand and if this
information shows a concrete figure of
management cost reduction, rather than
simply saying that “management is made
easier.”
 w w w. o r a c l e . c o m / s a p 55

http://www.oracle.com/sap

http://www.oracle.com/sap oracle.com

Please visit our Website for more information about Oracle database for SAP customers.
56

“The SGI platforms had already proven to be the best platforms for our technical IT applications.
Even in extremely data-intensive environments, they run faster and are more stable than
proprietary platforms, and also give us the flexibility we need to satisfy the highly complex
requirements of our business areas.”

– NORBERT DIEHL,
Head of IT Technology, MTU Aero Engines

S G I A N D S A P O N O R A C L E D ATA B A S E AT M T U
AERO ENGINES OPTIMIZED IT INFRASTRUTURE
MEETS SHIFTING AND GROWING GLOBAL MARKET
REQUIREMENTS

Industry:
MTU Aero Engines
Downsteam (refining and
marketing) activities outside
KUWAIT Petroleum S.p.A.
Workforce:
Approx. 4700 (entire company)
Oracle Products & Services:
• Oracle Database 10g
• Oracle Real Application
Clusters (RAC) 10.2
• Oracle Clusterware
SAPCTL/Control Utility
• Oracle Support
Key Benefits:
• More flexibility and
scalability in use of SAP
• Greater SAP stability / high
availability
• Enhanced performance
• Base for extensive experience
with new technologies
For more than ten years, MTU Aero Engines
has relied on SGI® servers to drive its complex
technical IT operations. Recently the company
moved to further optimize its database en-
vironment by migrating its SAP® component
for production planning, SAP Advanced
Planning & Optimization–SAP APO, to its
existing Linux® OS-based SGI® Altix® server
platform. The result is that MTU has cut
operating costs by more than 20 percent
compared to its previous architectures, while
still fulfilling the high resource requirements
demanded by SAP APO. To further leverage
the potential of SGI for the SAP solutions,
MTU now plans to consolidate additional
SAP components on SGI Altix platforms.
As database system, MTU uses Oracle 10g,
mainly because of its stability and performance
especially for BW requirements.
Meeting the Demands of the Enterprise
Market
Originally designed for high-performance
computing in scientific applications, SGI Altix
servers are now increasingly being deployed to
meet the needs of Enterprise customers such
as MTU.
“As we expand internationally, SGI platforms
enable us to adapt our IT infrastructures to
meet shifting and growing global market
requirements,” said Norbert Diehl, IT manager
of technology, MTU.
“Our IT systems have to be able to process
millions of transactions every day and have
the power and scalability to handle complex
monitoring, reporting, and analysis tasks.
SGI delivers the performance we need to meet
the demands of our worldwide enterprise.”
Step-by-Step Migration
MTU embarked on the SAP APO project in
mid 2005. To manage the project, the company
assembled a team that leveraged the combined
expertise of representatives from MTU IT
Technology, service provider T-Systems and
SGI. Working together, the team was able to
design and implement the new system in just
six months.
In the first stage of the project, the team up-
graded three SGI® Altix® 3450 servers already
in use at MTU. To optimize the servers for
the new SAP application, they developed a
configuration in which one server was used
for live operation of the SAP APO component,
another was converted for quality control
and development and a third was deployed
as a “hot standby” system which operated in
parallel.
“By recycling these relatively new hardware
platforms, we were able to prolong their
operating life by four or five years,” said
Norbert Diehl. “This alone represents a cost
savings of 15 to 30 percent.”

After Oracle database tests had been success-
fully completed on the SGI Altix 3450 servers,
the SAP APO component was installed, tested
and put into operation in parallel with the
production system. The team then set up and
tested the system’s high-availability functions
and provided access to the new IT infrastructure
for a limited number of users. In November
2006, the full range of SAP APO functions
was made available. Today, around 150 MTU
employees use SAP APO on SGI Altix 450
servers.
Impressive Results in the Test Phase
The ability of SGI computer technology to
maximize both the performance and availa-
bility of even very large SAP on Oracle
database was immediately evident to MTU
in the test phases.
“The SGI platforms had already proven to be
the best platforms for our technical IT
applications,” said Diehl. “Even in extremely
data-intensive environments, they run faster
and are more stable than proprietary platforms
– and they give us the flexibility we need to
satisfy the highly complex requirements of
our business areas. The combination of SAP
and SGI solutions provided impressive results
right from the start.”
Driving Significantly Faster Data Transfer
SGI Altix servers combine the company’s
high-performance NUMAflex® connection
with a global shared memory architecture
running on Intel® Itanium® processors and
open-source Linux operating systems.
NUMAflex is uniquely designed to share
system memory globally, across nodes. As a
result, data records do not have to be split into
smaller fragments for handling by individual
processors. Instead, all processors in the system
environment have one uniformly addressable
memory space where they can jointly handle
data. This means that data can be transferred
up to 200 times faster than in traditional
clusters, so that even highly complex
calculation problems can be solved in record
time.
SGI and SAP on Oracle at MTU Aero Engines 57
Through its global shared memory approach, “Altix servers provide
the SGI Altix platform provides applications enterprise customers
with a high level of performance, scalability with powerful com-
and availability, enabling access to complex puters that ensure the
data records in real time and making records performance, high
easy to manage and maintain. Globally
availability and stability
accessible memory also allows companies to
of SAP on Oracle data-
reduce their Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
base systems, while also
and maximize their Return on Investment
(ROI). allowing for dynamic
Costs can be reduced further by combining expansion.”
SGI technology with the highly scalable
Linux operating system. Using the open-source – Norbert Diehl,
Linux platform, companies can consolidate their Head of IT Technology,
existing IT resources more effectively, MTU Aero Engines.
implement new technologies more easily and
adjust their IT strategies flexibly to address
shifting business requirements.
Successful Partnership for SAP on Oracle
database
Like MTU, an increasing number of SAP
enterprise customers worldwide are opting for
SGI servers to satisfy the growing need for
dynamically extendable computing platforms.
Both SGI and SAP share the goal of providing
users with easily upgradeable, powerful and
highly available technologies. The two
companies provide complementary technology
that makes it possible for customers to respond
to shifts in market requirements while working
more profitably, faster and systematically.
58
SGI and SAP are both committed to open-
source technology, which can bring about
significant savings in both direct and indirect
IT costs compared to closed operating
systems. SGI is a long time member of the
SAP LinuxLab, where SAP collaborates with
selected partners to provide enterprise
customers with the best Linux performance
and functionality.
With SAP certification, SGI Altix enterprise
customers can leverage the benefits of the
Linux OS-based server line to operate even
the most advanced SAP system landscapes.
“SGI is an important hardware partner in
the SAP LinuxLab,” said Helge Deller,
development manager at the SAP LinuxLab.
“Altix servers provide enterprise customers
with powerful computers that ensure the
performance, high availability and stability of
SAP systems, while also allowing for dynamic
expansion.”
MTU Opts for Linux
MTU plans to further leverage the benefits
of open-source technology in the future.
As a result of the successful migration of its
technical applications, the company now
intends to convert other business IT systems
to Linux OS-based hardware platforms,
Linux OS-based
SAP-APO
Architecture
migrating additional SAP components to SGI
Altix servers.
“Our first major SAP migration project has
shown us that Linux is ready for deployment
in the Enterprise market,” said Dr. Friedemann
Ost, head of IT Services and Technology (FIS)
at MTU. “SGI enables us to consolidate and
integrate our SAP processes along the entire
value chain using a standard platform on
Linux,” added Norbert Diehl. “This makes it
possible for us to provide high-performance
systems in the Enterprise environment and con-
solidate know-how between engineering and
enterprise areas. By doing so, we can boost the
quality of our system landscape considerably.”
MTU Aero Engines
MTU Aero Engines, headquartered in Munich,
Germany, develops, produces, sells and main-
tains commercial and military aircraft engines –
in all thrust and power categories – as well as
stationary industrial gas turbines. MTU also
plays a major role in the military domain. As
the lead industrial partner to the Bundeswehr,
the unified armed forces of Germany, the com-
pany is responsible for nearly every type of air-
craft engine operated by the German defense
force. MTU is represented internationally by
subsidiaries in all key regions and markets,
with 6,700 employees worldwide. www.mtu.de
60
Chevron Corporation
Industry:
Oil and Gas
dd
Objective:
Keep pace with rapid global
expansion and mergers and
acquisitions by implementing
a more adaptable and cost-
effective ERPinfrastructure
Approach:
Consolidate 50 SAP instances
in multiple locations into one
data centre using HP Integrity
servers and the HP-UX 11i v2
platform on Oracle DB
IT improvements:
• New servers triple perform
ance and capacity of ERP
infrastructure
• New footprint takes 2/3 less
space
• Consistent 99.999% availability
exceeds SLAs
Business benefits:
• Faster applications and access
to business intelligence
improve productivity and
decisionmaking
• More scaleable yet stream-
lined platform supports
business growth and eases
integration of data from
mergers and acquisitions
• Server consolidation cuts
administrative, operating, and
floor-space costs, shifting
people and resources to more
strategic initiatives
“Our biggest challenge is to keep up with the growth of our ERP data and systems. We needed to
improve performance, but we also needed to consolidate servers so that we wouldn’t blow out
the walls of our data centre. The HP Integrity platform running HP-UX 11i allowed us to do both –
without any large migrations or downtime to the business.”
– P A U L B R O D Y,
System Analyst, Chevron Corporation
GLOBAL ENERGY LEADER PUMPS UP ERP FOR
RAPID GROWTH
Second-largest energy company in U.S. triples performance and capacity of SAP platform running on
Oracle database – while reducing administrative costs
Big oil – big databases Growing by terabytes
Chevron Corporation (www.chevron.com) is Global expansion and rapid business growth
the second-largest integrated energy company at Chevron – including mergers and acqui-
in the United States and one of the largest sitions – have also meant rapid growth in
corporations in the world. Headquartered in applications and users aswell as ever-larger
San Ramon, California, Chevron employs more streams of data to analyse and manage, from
than 59,000 people and conducts business in sources as varied as automated well monitors,
180 countries. seismic analyses and point-of-sale gas station
systems.
The rapidly growing energy leader, with
global operations encompassing every sector “Each of our Oracle repositories is growing by
of the oil and natural gas industry, generates more than a terabyte a year”, says Brody, who
vast amounts of data – both “up-stream” in led efforts to scale up the ERP infrastructure
Chevron’s exploration and production to handle this growth – and to prepare for
operations and “downstream” in its refining, future growth.
marketing and transportation operations.
Chevron wanted to achieve greater performance
“The oil industry is an IT-intensive endeavour”, and capacity in the least disruptive, most cost-
says systems analyst Paul Brody of Chevron. effective way possible.
Integrating all information throughout the
Chevron enterprise is a global ERP system
based on SAP R/3, several multiterabyte
Oracle databases, and a four-terabyte business
warehouse. Backed by proactive support from
HP Services, the resilient infrastructure
maintains 99.999 percent availability and
provides thousands of users with instant,
24x7 access to business-critical information.

Consolidating global SAP instance
Working with HP, Chevron consolidated its
global ERP operations on HP Integrity servers
running the HP-UX 11i v2 operating system.
“Integrity servers have allowed us to consolidate
systems physically hosted all around the world
into a single data centre and common plat-
form”, says Brody. The new platform hosts
multi-terabyte Oracle databases and more than
50 SAP instances for ERP, as well as core
Chevron functions such as finance, HR, deve-
lopment and quality assurance.
Employing HP Mission Critical and Proactive
Services, the Chevron IT team consistently
achieves five nines availability with the ERP
infrastructure.
Performance triples
“The Integrity platform immediately tripled
performance”, says Brody. “Jobs that used to
take three hours run in one hour, sometimes
even less.”
The ability to find, share and use business
intelligence faster enables Chevron employees
worldwide to do more with their talents, their
time, and the company’s assets. For example,
accounting groups routinely worked until
2:00 a.m. to complete the company’s monthly
financials. Now they close the books easily,
within regular working hours, month after
month.
“It’s not just the speed of the processors that’s
important, but the whole package that HP
delivers with it, including fast bus and I / O
speeds and low memory latency”, notes Steve
Wilson, Chevron’s technical architect for the
ERP project. “We’re running big databases
that need big I/O pipes and fast buses. Oracle
runs much faster on Integrity servers.
SAP on Oracle database and HP at Chevron 61
And HP continues to deliver even higher “HP has been a great
performance and lower latency to memory”, partner over the years.
Wilson continues. “Its Integrity servers with We have a close relation-
Dual-Core Intel® Itanium® 2 processors will ship with HP Services.
fit into our high end as our warehouse expands We meet together monthly
to five terabytes. to review changes in our
environment.”
Doing more – without spending more
Consolidating the number of servers and – Steve Wilson,
simplifying the platform have also made
Technical Architect,
administering systems easier and less expensive.
Chevron Corporation.
“We’ve improved performance to the end users,
improved reliability, supported a number
of additional systems, and at the same time
not really increased our costs”, says Brody.
“We’ve been able to keep our support team
roughly the same in terms of numbers and
capital outlay.”
And, adds Wilson, ”Because the new Integrity
servers fit in one-third of the footprint of the
older systems, it enables us to do more with
our existing space.”
Bottom-line, says Brody, “We haven’t had to
ask the corporation for more money to run
this new IT infrastructure.”
62
Five nines availability
While improving the performance and
manageability of its ERP applications and
data, Chevron had to ensure the security and
availability of these business-critical resources.
“These are large and critical assets”, says Brody.
“They integrate information throughout our
entire enterprise. They can’t be down.”
The Chevron IT team leverages the built-in
reliability and efficiencies of the HP-UX 11i v2
environment and employs HP OpenView
management software and HP Mission Critical
and Proactive Services to consistently achieve
SLAs for 99.999 percent availability.
“We have a close relationship with HP Ser-
vices”, says Wilson.”We meet together monthly
to review changes in our environment.
HP continues to enhance the HP-UX 11i
operating system with tools that automate
security and system management. For example,
we use the IP filter feature of HP-UX quite
a bit to restrict port numbers and the IP
addresses that can connect to our servers.”
“We’ve built our monitoring infrastructure
around HP OpenView management software”,
Wilson continues. “It alerts our SAP system
administrators if any component is not con-
figured properly or functions outside our
prescribed metrics. OpenView has alerted us
many, many times to problems that can then
be addressed before end users are impacted.”
Wilson adds that HP has also incorporated
some of Chevron’s own scripts and processes
into the HP OpenView system.
Moving to Integrity systems in two hours
The Chevron IT team worked with HP and
SAP engineers to transfer their global ERP
environment from PA-RISC–based HP 9000
servers to the 64-bit HP Integrity platform.
Because HP delivers data compatibility and a
common release of the HP-UX 11i UNIX®
operating environment on both HP 9000 and
Integrity platforms, the transfer to Integrity
servers required no data migration.
A HP-UX 11i v2 and HP Integrity server
platform enables Chevron’s global ERP
infrastructure to keep pace cost-effectively
with rapid growth in data and operations.
Primary application
• Enterprise resource planning
Primary hardware
• HP Integrity rx4640 Servers
Primary software
• HP-UX 11i v2 operating system
• HP OpenView v7.1 management
solutions
• HP OpenView Storage Area Manager
• SAP R/3
• Oracle database versions 9.2.0.5,
9.2.0.7 and 10.2.0.2
Services
• HP Business Infrastructure Support
• HP Mission Critical and Proactive
Services
“The process took two hours during a
weekend”, says Brody, “with no downtime to
the business.”
“We didn’t have to export any data or rewrite
code”, continues Brody. “And the transition
was transparent to users. All they noticed was
the threefold gain in processing speed.”

Productive collaboration
Chevron’s IT team works closely with HP to
understand and influence the direction of
“what’s next.” The company participated in
beta-testing Oracle and SAP software on
Integrity servers, and Chevron collaborates
with HP engineers and HP Services consultants
on innovations to increase the productivity of
IT resources – including people, processes and
technologies.
“A decade ago, we started with the biggest
servers HP made”, says Wilson. “Now we run
smaller Integrity systems powerful enough to
support hundreds of users. HP products and
services have continued to stay ahead of our
requirements – including our cost targets.”
Virtual SAP partitions
Wilson also likes the way HP-UX 11i-based
Integrity servers come in a range of sizes to
handle changing needs. “We can’t always
predict IT needs”, he notes. “Suddenly you
acquire another company and you have to put
all that data into a business warehouse.”
“Each Integrity server is a modular environ-
ment that we can configure in myriad ways”,
Wilson continues.
“Memory, disk drives and CPUs are all quickly
swappable among systems.” HP-UX 11i v2
virtualisation capabilities, he adds, “will enable
us to cost-effectively maintain dedicated en-
vironments for multiple SAP applications – all
on one server.”
SAP on Oracle database and HP at Chevron 63
Fuelling growth
“It’s critical to Chevron that we efficiently and
effectively scale up IT to meet the emerging
needs of our businesses”, says Brody. “Working
with HP and its Integrity servers, we’ve
achieved that – and stayed cost-competitive.”
“We run multiple SAP instances and Oracle
databases on a single server using just 50
percent of capacity”, says Wilson, “so we have
plenty of room for growth.”
Moving forward, he adds, ”The Integrity
architecture scales far beyond the reach of any
64-bit x86-based platform.”
Chevron has transformed its ERP environment
into a business asset which is as dynamic as its
operations. The adaptable infrastructure can
smoothly and cost-effectively keep pace with
ever-larger streams of data.
“As we look to the future, we see an enormous
amount of growth still coming”, concludes
Brody. “We believe that the Integrity platform
and the other investments that HP is making
are going to help us scale out for the future
and provide the reliability and performance
we need, while keeping our costs manageable.”
64 All4it Group

All4it focuses his offer on a SAP ERP on Oracle database delivery solutions

I T S T R AT E G Y A N D T R A N S F O R M AT I O N : A L L 4 I T ' S
S T R AT E G I C I T E F F E C T I V E N E S S P R O F E S S I O N A L S
H E L P O R G A N I Z AT I O N S O P T I M I Z E I N V E S T M E N T S ,
T R A N S F O R M C A PA B I L I T I E S A N D A C H I E V E
G R E AT E R B U S I N E S S VA L U E F R O M I T.

Founded in 1997, All4it was surrounded by conducted jointly with All4it. Today, as part
senior consultants to issue an advisory service of strategy partners, Oracle chose All4it for
for high value-added technology around the its ability to manage end-to-end projects.
All4it Group Oracle database for SAP: Consulting,
technology and outsourcing. From a practical point of view, All4it invested
in programs Oracle for SAP Organization:
Industry: Through large projects at the enterprise level, Global Technology Center, RAC Beta testing
Consulting & outsourcing All4it now offers a range of vertical services, program, to be perpetually aware of best
from physical infrastructure, to the business practices.
Locations: borders of the information systems.
• Luxembourg Last fall in Paris at the event Fujitsu-Siemens
• Belgium In particular, All4it has managed to distinguish to the “Palais des Congrès” (FSC-Future IT),
• France
this market that supports projects involving All4it was implementing a platform RAC-10g/
Annual Revenue:
very large databases and infrastructure SAP SAP-ECC6 to demonstrate the capabilities of
and respecting the strength core business of solution FlexFrame for SAP Solution.
12,5 M€
its customers. Specifically, All4it led many
Employees: successful ECC/Oracle database migrations In summary, the success of All4it builds on
135
and major implementations of new Oracle the following key drivers:
features (RAC, partitioning, charset migration,
- Understanding of the issues customers
For additional information environment split/merge, key index com-
upstream phase of study and design
regarding All4it, please visit pression, Flashback, Data Guard, and now,
our website at www.All4it.com, Database Vault) in compliance with the rules - Project monitoring and control
or contact Olivier Lambert at of SAP ERP and BI support. - Proposals of the best technologies, federation,
+33 6 08 73 09 92 implementation, skills transfer
The partnership between Oracle database &
- Integration of technologies offered by
SAP and All4it is historic. First, from the
manufacturers like IBM, HP and others
origin of its employees and then thanks to
the permanent will to better meet its
and finally propose optimizations in
customers utilizing the technologies offered
outsourcing of the operation to free up
by Oracle. Recently Decathlon, leader in
budgets ...
distribution of sports items, was wining by
the acquisition of SAP Award from the
innovation 2007, thanks to migration ECC5.0
 Delta Consulting 65

D E LTA C O N S U LT I N G

Delta Consulting, Inc. is an SAP-focused consultancy offering extensive SAP consulting

services and Software Components for it’s SAP Customer Base. Delta has a deep rooted
belief that the successful implementation of an SAP solution involves much more than
installing software – it requires the integration of people, processes and technology.
Our extensive SAP expertise and multi-disciplinary business backgrounds makes Delta
consultants uniquely qualified to effectively deliver a broad range of SAP solutions.

As a certified SAP Services Partner for over
10 years and a member of the Oracle Preferred
Partner Program (OPP), Delta Consulting is
pleased to announce its selection by Oracle
to extend its agreement to provide support
services for Oracle Real Application Clusters
(RAC). Using SAP with Oracle RAC offers
a unique solution for SAP customers already
running Oracle by providing them with a total
solution that provides high availability and
scalability. Our team includes highly skilled
and experienced Oracle DBA’s who are trained
and certified in SAP basis administration.
Oracle 10g RAC is the highly scalable and
reliable database cluster for mission critical
SAP solutions. Our commitment and focus
on this technology enables Delta Consulting
to bring the best practices for migrating an
existing SAP R/3 4.6D installation from a
single instance Oracle database to a multiple
instance Oracle RAC cluster database confi-
guration.
Services to be provided by Delta Consulting
include:
• RAC Implementations
• Database Migrations
• Tuning and Performance Optimization
• Backup/Recovery and Hot Standby Solutions
Over two-thirds of all mid-sitze to high-end
SAP customers run their applications on Oracle.
With SAP’s endorsement and certification of
Oracle 10g RAC, the motivation to implement
RAC include: Delta
For additional
• Higher Availability information regarding
– New Requirements Delta Consulting,
– Maintenance window negotiation please visit our website
– More and more work places rely on at www.go-delta.com
SAP ERP or contact:
Jack Tomb, Partner at
610-558-1730.
• More Flexibility
– Dynamical growth by adding servers
– Better reuse of equipment
• Cost Savings
– Buy cheaper servers (scale out)
– Reduce maintenance costs
Want to increase the ROI on your existing
SAP system? Working with Delta Consulting,
we can help you explore areas where you can
leverage industry best practices and make
current processing even more efficient. We
offer a wide array to help you take advantage
of your SAP investment.
Delta Consulting, Inc.
5 Christy Drive, Suite 109
Chadds Ford, PA 19317
Toll Free: 1-888-461-5553
Phone: 1-650-558-1730
E-mail: info@go-delta.com
Website: www.go-delta.com
 66 IOUG – SAP Special Interest Group (SAP SIG)
IOUG SAP SPECIAL INTEREST GROUP (SAP SIG)
Join us at Collaborate 2009
in Orlando Florida, May 3 – 7.
The Independent Oracle User Group (IOUG)
sponsors Special Interest Groups (SIGs) that
are designed to assist members with specific
Oracle products and products that are tightly
integrated with the Oracle products they use.
The goal of the IOUG SIGs is to offer technical
IOUG
information and peer-to-peer collaboration in
order to facilitate the effective implementation
of products.
The SAP SIG provides a forum for open discus-
sion and education on Oracle technology
related issues associated with SAP running on
an Oracle database.
During the 1998 IOUG conference a group
of about 40 attendees started as a roundtable
to surface issues and solutions to common
problems. The group has grown every year since
and officially became an IOUG SIG in 1999.
IOUG SAP SIG Mission
The mission of the SAP SIG is to provide a
forum for open discussion, education and
networking to meet the challenges of
implementing, and maintaining Oracle
databases with SAP Applications. The SAP
SIG facilitates raising issues and providing
enhancement suggestions to both SAP AG
and Oracle development teams.
The benefits of SAP SIG membership inclu-
de; offering open forums for discussion and
networking opportunities among members,
education sessions at Collaborate, periodic
conference calls and web conferences with guest
speakers covering a range of technical topics.
SAP SIG Events
The main events for the SAP SIG are held at
the yearly Collaborate Conference. Each year
there is a business meeting, networking recep-
tion, SAP/Oracle Development Update, and
Panel Discussion with participation from both
SAP and Oracle. Also lunch time meetings
offer informal discussions and formal technical
sessions on various SAP/Oracle issues.
The SAP SIG also sponsors quarterly techno-
logy forums. The forums are one hour dial-in
calls or Web Casts, each forum focuses on a
specific topic of interest to the SIG. This is a
great opportunity to stay in touch with the
Oracle and SAP technical communities.
Web Site
The SAP SIG web site can be accessed from
the IOUG web site at: http://www.ioug.org/
Click the Special Interest Groups Tab, then
followed by SAP SIG in the drop down lists.
Or use the following link:
http://www.ioug.org/networking/sap/sap.cfm
Membership
Membership in the SAP SIG comes with your
IOUG membership.
See details at: http://www.ioug.org/
Join IOUG:
http://www.ioug.org/about/join.cfm
For more information please contact:
Thomas Stickler, IOUG SAP SIG Liaison
Oracle Corporation
thomas.stickler@oracle.com

S A P D ATA B A S E A D M I N I S T R AT I O N W I T H O R A C L E
André Faustmann, Michael Höding, Gunnar Klein,
Ronny Zimmermann
Oracle is one of the most significant, DB plat-
forms available for SAP systems – so why hasn’t
someone written a book on how to configure
the interaction? Well, here it is: With this
in-depth reference book, administrators get
much needed background knowledge, as well
as complete details on architectural and
software/logistics issues, in addition to step-
by-step instructions for all of the most
important administration tasks. Every aspect
of system landscape planning and mainten-
ance is covered, helping administrators hone
their problem solving skills. Bonus chapters
deal with Java, SAP NetWeaver BI, and the
highly complex issues of Backup, Recovery,
and Restoration.
What this book covers:
- Interaction of SAP and Oracle database
- Planning and expanding the system
landscape
- System life-cycle: Installation, system
maintenance, upgrades
- Performance: Analysis of hardware,
operating system, database, SAP system,
SQL instructions and much more
- Backup, recovery and restore: Data backup
methods, BR*Tools, Oracle Recovery
Manager, backup strategies
- Oracle and SAP NetWeaver BI
SAP Press – SAP Database Administration with Oracle 67
SAP PRESS
818 p., 2008,
bound, with reference card
€89.95,
ISBN 978-1-59229-120-5
Immediate delivery
available
• Provides guidance on
administration and back-
ground knowledge
• Helpful advice for planning
the system landscape,
performance optimization
and monitoring
• Includes chapters devoted
to backup, recovery and
restore, Java and SAP
Press comments:
NetWeaver BI
IT & Production:
The publication on the interaction of SAP and
Oracle DBMS (Database Management System)
provides administrators with basic knowledge
about the SAP system and database, looks at
architecture and software logistics issues and
explains administration tasks in SAP lands-
capes. It combines background knowledge
with practical guidance, helping the reader
to address specific administration problems.
For example, it contains advice on improving
the performance of the system operation and
improving availability and data security.
The book is equally suitable for administrators
who want to upgrade a legacy SAP installation
and Oracle experts who wish to use their
know-how in conjunction with SAP.
68
ORACLE ADVANCED CUSTOMER SERVICES FOR SAP
Database Services for SAP Environments
Oracle database and SAP
More than two thirds of all mid-size to high-end
SAP customers entrust their data to the Oracle
database. Almost two million registered users
– in nearly ten thousand locations have come
to expect the best technology and performance
that the Oracle database brings to the SAP
environment. This outstanding performance
level is a direct result of years of intensive
partnership between SAP and Oracle database.
However, the SAP and Oracle database co-
operation does not end with the database
technology integration. Customer support and
satisfaction are tangible day-to-day benefits
of the ongoing partnership.
This extraordinary level of customer support is
the result of SAP’s requirement for permanent
on-site Oracle Support staff. This group staffs
the Development Level Support queue and
provides immediate assistance for a wide range
of activities and issues from semi-critical to
critical priority 1 “production down” situations.
The SAP Support and Services group at Oracle
was created to coordinate and staff this SAP-
focused customer support team. We are a world-
wide services group, with locations in Walldorf
(Germany), Palo Alto (US), and Tokyo (Japan),
providing assistance for all aspects of SAP opera-
tions. More specifically, our mandate covers
tasks ranging from management of increasing
data volumes, performance optimization, setup
of high availability solutions, to data exchange
between the SAP system and other Oracle data-
bases over a secure interface.
In addition to our integrated support with
SAP, many customers choose to engage Oracle
Support directly to help achieve even greater
performance and ROI from their SAP-Oracle
configured environment. These services are
available through Oracle’s Advanced Customer
Services (ACS) organization. Advanced Custo-
mer Services experts deliver personalized
services directly to customers worldwide to
maximize performance and increase produc-
tivity for all Oracle systems. Recently, Oracle
Advanced Customer Services formalized a
portfolio of personalized services for customers
using the Oracle database in SAP environ-
ments.
“SAP works in partnership with Oracle to
provide quality system support. Many of our
joint customers however, require even higher
levels of support for their database environ-
ments to leverage maximum Oracle capabili-
ties. Our annualized services take support
to the next level”, explains Larry Abramson,
senior vice president, Oracle Advanced
Customer Services.
The services provide for three levels of annua-
lized operational support, custom scoped
engagements and onsite Technical Skill Work-
shops. All Advanced Customer Services
Database Services for SAP Environments are
delivered by Oracle support experts who are
skilled in maximizing Oracle technology
contributions to overall system performance,
stability and recoverability. Oracle Advanced
Customer Services, in concert with SAP, lever-
ages over 20 years of partnership experience in
delivering SAP solutions operating with the
Oracle database.
Oracle with SAP Expert Guidance
Tailored to Your Business
Database Services for SAP Environments
offers three levels of annualized services or
<<services that can be combined to meet your
specific needs.

Advanced Support Assistance – facilitates and
expedites service requests through a single
point of contact, Your Service Delivery Manager
(SDM) ensures that the right people and orga-
nizations are aligned with meaningful action
plans resulting in more efficient and effective
issue resolution.
Business Critical Assistance – combines service
request resolution with proactive advice and
assistance tailored to your specific operations
and projects. Your SDM coordinates the efforts
of a team of engineers who develop background
capabilities on your company and your IT
goals, and then assist with ensuring a successful
outcome for each of your projects.
Solution Support Center – offers our most
comprehensive service, with a team of focused
engineers that are deeply aware of your environ-
ment, operations and projects. This focused
team of engineers is available to you through
a direct access hotline to provide assistance for
critical Service Requests and a range of pro-
active services including assessments and root
cause analysis.
Depending on the level chosen, Oracle Ad-
vanced Customer Services offer the specialized
expertise of a Service Delivery Manager (SDM)
who is familiar with SAP and support processes
to serve as your Oracle support focal point.
SDMs work with you to establish an annual
support plan that includes the identification
of your key business requirements, alignment
of support processes, and documentation of
joint contact information while incorporating
the existing SAP support model features.
One role of your designated SDM is to expedite
“high” or “very high” (SAP severity levels)
problem resolution activities and escalations.
SDMs also provide expert guidance when
Service Requests have multiple related inci-
dents, or show behavioral patterns that may
be the outcome of a common problem or issue,
or when the standard escalation process on an
individual issue does not address your specific
business needs.
Oracle Advanced Customer Services for SAP 69
Your SDM draws on the expertise of an exten-
ded team of support analysts and SAP environ-
ment specialists. Because your SDM speaks the
local language and understands your specific
business and IT context, he or she can apply
that context to the escalation to ensure your
issues are resolved effectively. Whatever the
circumstance, your SDM is personally commit-
ted to orchestrating a quick and appropriate
resolution to your Service Requests.
The SDM also leads formal quarterly reviews
to assess performance against best practice
standards, discuss your business and technical
plans, anticipate and avoid escalations, and
offer insight on how to ensure that you are
receiving the most value from your Oracle
relationship.
SAP Aware Service Delivery
SAP customers using our Services plans benefit
from faster access to Oracle through a direct
relationship. Getting the most functionality,
stability and availability from your Oracle
database software requires both Oracle and
Oracle with SAP expertise, due to the compli-
cated interoperability factors between SAP
applications and Oracle database software.
Advanced Customer Services help improve
your IT staff productivity by streamlining the
process of interpreting Oracle and SAP infor-
mation for patching and system configuration
changes. Customers can focus on the recom-
mendations that align with their specific
environments and versions. Not all Oracle
features are leveraged in standard SAP deploy-
ments, so Oracle Advanced Customer Services
stands ready to assist in enabling new features
while maintaining SAP Certified Configura-
tions.
70
Oracle/SAP Oriented Workshops and
Engagements
To build your IT staff’s capabilities and confi-
dence in optimizing the Oracle database in an
SAP environment, our workshops are created
and delivered by specialists who know how
SAP applications interact with Oracle Data-
bases. Based on a long history of technical
partnership with SAP, Oracle provides the
following Technical Skill Workshops:
- Fundamentals of Oracle database for SAP
ERP (Level I)
- Oracle Advanced Performance Tuning for
SAP ERP (Level II)
- Oracle Expert for SAP (Level III)
- Oracle database 10g for SAP Environments
- Oracle database Administration for SAP
Business Warehouse
- Oracle Real Application Clusters for SAP
- SAP ERP ABAP Tuning with Oracle data-
base Platform
To further enhance the value, these Technical
Skill Workshops can be modified and enhanced
to help ensure alignment with your specific
situation and goals. Technical Skill Workshops
are specific to your company, are scheduled
based on availability, and may not be available
in all geographies.
Many customers find that additional experience
and expertise is necessary during upgrades,
migrations, and other infrastructure changes.
Oracle can establish a statement of work to
provide such assistance with varying degrees
of Assisted Services involvement. Assisted
Services are support advisory services for custo-
mers who need customized assistance from
Oracle’s SAP engineers. The concept is to
provide Oracle engineers that are skilled with
the SAP application system, tools, procedures
and most importantly the Oracle database with
SAP. An Oracle engineer is assigned to the
customer for a predetermined period of time
to deliver agreed upon support services for the
efficient operation and management of Oracle
software operating in a SAP application envi-
ronment.
Our most popular engagements include:
- Database Planning and Configuration
- Database Health Check
- Database Partitioning
- SAP ERP Administration Concepts
- Review and Proof of Concepts
- Hot Standby/Data Guard Implementation
- Backup/Restore/Recovery
- RAC Setup Assistance
- HW Migration “O2O”/Oracle Advanced
Customer Services as Provider
- HW Migration Assistance “O2O” Packages
- Oracle Advanced Customer Services as
Advise and Assist
- Database Migration Assistance “R3LOAD”
- Database Reorganizations
With Advanced Customer Services for SAP
Environments, you enjoy a preferred relation-
ship with Oracle subject-matter experts, IT
professionals, and developers to maximize the
value of your Oracle environment. Shown
below are descriptions of several engagement
types.
Database Planning and Configuration
of an SAP System
At the beginning of an SAP project, application
design and implementation are the primary
focus of most activities. This time is most
critical for ensuring that the configuration
and design of your database is configured
optimally and flexible enough for meeting
your future needs. Improper or suboptimal
configuration means increased effort in terms
of operational efficiency and management.
Customers are advised to engage the proper
resources during the initial stage of your SAP
project to help you prepare and configure the
database with current best practices and your
design goals in mind.

Database Healthcheck/Performance Analysis
Performance is one of the keys to success in
the introduction and operation of an SAP
system for all SAP customers. Our specially
trained staff, not only knows the Oracle data-
base in detail, but is also trained in the intri-
cacies of Oracle in a SAP environment. Thus,
our staff is positioned to analyze any perfor-
mance problem and to provide solutions. These
solutions could be, for example, in the areas
of index design, parameter optimization, ABAP
optimization or adaptation of operating system
parameters. Our staff is also, of course, able to
deal with specific features of individual SAP
solutions. Performance problems in SAP ERP
or BI/BW systems appear in various forms and
therefore the approaches to solution-solving
will vary.
High Availability/Backup Concepts
Unavailability of the SAP system leads to mas-
sive problems for most customers (logistically
and financially). In order to minimize the risk
of unplanned downtime in a mission critical
environment, IT organizations must proactively
plan for failover and recoverability. However,
in this area there are very different approaches,
all with advantages and disadvantages (hard-
ware clusters, mirror technologies, standby
databases, RAC, Data Guard...). Oracle ACS
can advise on the optimal approach strategy
for your company and, of course, help during
implementation of the chosen solution.
Oracle RAC Enablement for SAP
Oracle provides the “Real Application Clusters”
(RAC) option. You can use this option to
distribute the database instance on different
servers (nodes). This offers new possibilities
in the area of high availability of an Oracle
database system, and also provides greater
flexibility in the dimensioning of system
resources (scalability). Oracle provides profes-
sional services to assist you with enabling
RAC for your SAP environments. These services
include workshops, planning, and implemen-
tation of RAC software.
Oracle Advanced Customer Services for SAP 71
Database Migration Services for SAP
A great majority of all SAP ERP installations
run on an Oracle database. The Oracle Ad-
D A T A B A S E 11g
vanced Customer Services for SAP group is
certified by SAP for database migrations and
can assist companies who wish to migrate
their SAP Business Suite installation from
a non-Oracle database to Oracle. One reason
that our migration services are highly valued
by customers is the familiarity of the change
from a DBA perspective. Oracle Advanced
Customer Services can assist your staff in exe-
cuting a migration plan while familiarizing
them with the new database operations.
Oracle to Oracle Database Migrations (O2O)
– Extremely Fast and Smooth Database
Migrations for SAP Systems, Heterogeneous
Database Migrations
Because standard tools require long transfer
times, many situations require more than 48
hours, Oracle provides “O2O” migration
services. Based on a set of services, procedures
and tools, Oracle ACS can help customers
achieve a significantly faster process, typically
at a speed of 100 to 150 GB per hour. This
means systems can now be migrated that could
not be handled previously using standard tools.
The service set is based on Oracle technologies,
and support migrations of SAP ERP as well as
BI/BW systems. Systems using this advanced
migration approach remain fully within SAP
supportability requirements.
Oracle Partitioning for SAP Customers
Oracle Partitioning is an option to Oracle
database 10g Enterprise Edition. At a technical
level, Oracle Partitioning allows tables and
indexes within a database to be subdivided
into smaller pieces. Oracle can “partition” a
table by ranges of values, so for example, the
data for Jan 1, 2009 through Jan 31, 2009
can reside in its own partition. Oracle can also
partition a table by a list of values, so that
North American data is in one partition, while
the European data is in another partition.
Partitioning is a critical feature for managing
large databases.
72 Oracle Advanced Customer Services for SAP
g Growth is the basic challenge that partitioning
D A T A B A S E 11 addresses for large databases, and Oracle Par-
titioning enables a “divide and conquer” tech-
nique for managing the large tables in the
database, especially as those tables grow.
Although your database may have twice as
much data next year as it does today, your
end-users are not going to tolerate their appli-
cation running twice as slow, your database is
not going to be given twice as much time to
complete maintenance and batch processing,
and your IT managers are not going to double
your hardware budget.
Partitioning is the feature that allows a data-
base to scale for very large datasets while
maintaining consistent performance, without
an unduly increased need for hardware resour-
ces or administrative efforts. Oracle Partitioning
is embedded into the core database engine
and supported by Oracle’s administrative tools.
From an SAP application perspective, partitio-
ning is completely transparent: no changes
need to be made to the application or to the
SQL statements in order to use partitioning.
Partitioning for SAP is supported since SAP
Release 4.6C (see SAP Note 742243) SAP
Kernel 6.20 Please contact us for more informa-
tion and see further more the Success Story for
Partitioning at Coop Switzerland under
www.oracle.com/sap.
Preparing for Oracle database 11g
SAP AG will skip Oracle database 11g
Release 1 and certify Oracle database 11g
Release 2, at least 12 months before Oracle
database Release 10g goes into the extended
support cycle.
As Oracle and SAP refine and test integration
for supportability of Oracle database 11g,
Oracle Advanced Customer Services continues
service delivery preparations for this upgrade
activity. Oracle Advanced Customer Services
can assist your staff in preparing upgrade plans
between Oracle database versions.
Whether through our ongoing support and
partnership with SAP, or directly with your
IT organization, Oracle Advanced Customer
Services deliver personalized services with
deep familiarity with the intricacies of the
SAP environment.
For further information please contact in:
Europe, Middle East and Africa
Michael.Weick@oracle.com
North America
Kumar.Allamraju@oracle.com
Japan, Asia, Pacific
Sam.Viola@oracle.com
Latin America
Rene.Barrera@oracle.com
 IS4IT – IT Consulting 73

PEOPLE, KNOWLEDGE, PROJECTS, AND IS4IT =

4 SUCCESS FACTORS TO HELP YOU GET AHEAD!

The main task of IS4IT, as a manufacturer-

independent IT-consulting firm, is solving our
clients’ technical problems through the
application of our IT-specialists’ expertise.

We provide IT services individually-tailored to

your specific requirements. With the help of Contact:
around 85 consultants across Germany, we Michael Jilg
provide a full range of services, from analysis, Area Manager
conception, and planning, to final IS4IT GmbH
implementation to the production process. Gruenwalder Weg 28b
82041 Oberhaching/Germany
SAP Basis and SAP Infrastructure have success- Tel: +49 89 638 98 48 22
fully been our main focus for many years. e-mail: michael.jilg@is4it.de
From the very beginning, our activities have
included solving problems of server- and
storage virtualization, as well as HA cluster.

In addition to handling such projects, we also

provide our customers with SAP technical
maintenance in accordance with Service Level
Agreements.
74 Useful links Oracle database for SAP customers

Oracle Database Global Technology Center for SAP
http://www.oracle.com/sap
Customer Success Stories, SAP on Oracle
http://www.oracle.com/newsletters/sap/archive.html
Events
http://www.oracle.com/newsletters/sap/events.html
Oracle Support and Services for SAP customers
http://www.oracle.com/newsletters/sap/service.html
Oracle for SAP
http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/ora
http://service.sap.com/dbaora-BC-DB-ORA-RAC
http://service/sap/com-PAM

Some OSS Notes Oracle and SAP

1021844 Extension of Oracle 9.2 maintenance until July 31, 2008
105047+ 742243 + 722188 Partitioning and Oracle Functionality supported by SAP
156548 Supported database and operating system releases for SAP Kernel version 4.6x
23875 Supported database and operating system releases for SAP Kernel version 3.1I^
407314 Supported database and operating system releases for SAP Web Application Server 6.x
524816 Enqueue Service for RAC SAP-Enqueue-Service
527843 Oracle RAC support in the SAP environment
740897 Licensing
581312 Licensing
581320 FAQ Oracle RAC for SAP
592393 FAQ Oracle
1125923 + 966117 + 966073 Flashback Database
598678 Oracle9i: New functions (composite SAP Note)
669902 Oracle9i: Setting the national character set to UTF8 (This note is valid also for Oracle 10g)
701235 Compressed Data Segments
705608 SAP RAC specific monitors
720886 Oracle database 10g: Integration into the SAP environment
740897 Info about the Oracle license scope; required Oracle options
819655 Add. info.: Upgrade to SAP NW 2004s ABAP ORACLE
819829 Oracle database 10g: Instant Client 10.x on Unix
819830 Oracle database 10g: Additional Information on upgrade:UNIX
820062 Oracle database 10g: Patch sets/patches for 10.1.0
828268 Oracle database 10g: New functions
830576 Parameter recommendations for Oracle 10g
830982 HW fine tuning for SAP on RAC environment
836517 Oracle database 10g: Preparation for SAP-upgrade
838725 Oracle database 10g: New database statistics
841728 Oracle database 10g: Software installation wizzard 10.2.0
85838 Supported database and operating system releases for SAP Kernel versions 4.5x and 4.0x
871096 Oracle database 10g: Patch sets/patches for 10.2.0
885167 Add. info.: Upgrade to SAP NW 2004s Java ORACLE
921594 Inst. SAP NetWeaver2004s SR1 - UNIX: Oracle
925871 'Customer Care Support' for Oracle 9.2
932722 Upgrade to Oracle 10.2 during a database copy
940794 Releasing Oracle 10.2 versions for older SAP versions
940811 Oracle database 10g: Migration from 32-bits to 64-bits
973450 Advanced Security (Network Encryption)
974876 Advanced Security (Transparent Data Encryption)
998004 Update the Oracle Instant Client on Windows
990955 Oracle Datamining Connector 2.1 for SAP
1027012 Details about MOPatching
1109743 Index Compression
1086956 + 1058988 Instant Client
142635 Installation of a backup library for Oracle
968507 Considerable enhancements to backups using BR Tools 7.00
964619 Oracle database 10g: Block change tracking
1016173 Verifying database and archive log files using RMAN
110153 Support for RMAN save sets for backups and hard disk
148535 Database backup fails with RMAN-04005/ORA-01031
170013 Differences between Brbackup with “All“ and “Full”
620803 Oracle 9i /10g: Automatic segment space Management
910389 FAQ: Oracle Segment Shrinking
646681 Recognizing tables with BR SPACE
355771 Migration to ASSM
1043381 Performance problems with Indexes in ASSM table spaces
896717 Performance problems.....
983230 LOB corruption
1037755 Performance problems....
1124639 Long runtime for DSO
1166242 enq: HW contention
859841 Uninstall of Oracle Partitoning software option
937492 FAQ: Oracle Flashback
602843 Oracle_SID
1033126 BR tools setup
905359 Using BR Tools
562403 FAQ: Oracle Net
830578 Oracle database 10g: Linux environment variable
 Imprint 76

Oracle Corporation

World Headquarters
500 Oracle Parkway
Redwood Shores,
CA 94065
U.S.A.

Published by
Oracle Corporation,
Oracle Database for SAP
Global Technology Center

Albrecht Haug
albrecht.haug@oracle.com
Altrottstr. 31
69190 Walldorf, Germany
Tel. ++49 (0) 6227-8398 - 0
Fax ++49 (0) 6227-8398 - 199
E-mail:
saponoracle_de@oracle.comX
Internet:
http://www.oracle.com/sap
http://www.sap.com/
partner/index.htm
Oracle, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, and Siebel are registered trademarks of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. SAP, SAP ERP, SAP NetWeaver,
R/3 and all other SAP product and service names mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of
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is provided for information purposes only, and the contents here of are subject to change without notice. This document is not warranted to be
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