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11gD A T A B A S E
Oracle SAPfor
– the Grid enabledplatform
Oracle for SAPis safe, reliableand scalable
®®
No. 17 Oracle for SAP, April 2008
www.oracle.com/sap
T E C H N O L O G Y U P D A T E
N E WOracle Database Vault for SAP Customers
Oracle for SAP
is safe, reliable and scalable
– the Grid enabled platform
1 Editorial
2 Oracle 11g outlook and 10g supported features for SAP
6 Oracle Advanced Security Option (ASO) for SAP
8 Q & A Oracle Database Vault
13 Oracle Database Security
14 Interview – Between Oracle for SAP Technology Update Magazine and Dr. Christian Graf, SAP AG
18 New Oracle Technology Features for SAP customers (Compression, Partitioning, ASO)
23 Oracle Data Guard at Vilene Ltd. Japan
26 Oracle 10g RAC for SAP at HR Group (Reno shoes)
28 Oracle 10g RAC for SAP at Staedtisches Klinikum Munich
30 Oracle RAC for SAP at Gruppo Hera
33 Oracle 10g RAC for SAP at Stadtwerke Munich
36 Oracle 10g RAC for SAP at Cat Logistics Services
40 COOP is benefiting from Oracle Partitioning Option for SAP
42 Winter Corporation: Field Experience with Large-Scale Data Warehousing on Oracle (Colgate Palmolive Company)
45 Certified SAP on RAC Configurations for Windows and Linux
46 DELL-SAP on RAC Promotion
48 Oracle Advanced Customer Services for SAP
52 Mentor Graphics – Technology leader manage financial data and its most important assets – people
55 Oracle 10g RAC World Record: SAP Standard Application Benchmarks
58 SWAROVSKI increases SAP System availability with Oracle Data Guard
60 IOUG – SAP Special Interest Group (SAP SIG)
61 Oracle 10g Datamining Connector 2.1 for SAP BI customers
64 Delta Consulting
65 E2SCorp – Everest Business Solution, Inc
66 UPW Innovative IT-Solutions – Policy Guard Manager – PGM for SAP, Oracle and Operating System
67 IS4IT – SAP on RAC Implementation and IT-Consulting
68 TUSC – Oracle Partner for SAP
69 SAP Press – SAP Database Administration with Oracle
70 California State University, CHICO College of Business – Hosting SAP on Oracle (IOUG SAP SIG)
72 Useful links Oracle Database for SAP customers
73 Imprint
C O N T E N T S
g10D A T A B A S E
D E A R S A P C U S T O M E R ,
For almost 20 years Oracle has been the safe, reliable, and scalable database of choice by SAP
customers. The Oracle database is optimized for SAP applications and two thirds of SAP
customers around the world, in every industry, entrust their application deployments on
Oracle databases. Customers are running their SAP applications with Oracle on all major
operating systems including Windows, Linux, and Unix.
Oracle Corporation and SAP AG have an ongoing commitment to our joint customers andhave just extended the long-standing reseller and customer support agreements, whichprovide enhanced access to Oracle Database technology and improved customer support.
Today, the Oracle database and the high availability and scalability option Real Application
Clusters (RAC) as well as Oracle Dataguard (DG) are supported and widely adopted by SAP customers.
Oracle is again breaking down the barriers and leading the way in the creation, development, and manufacturing of theindustry’s most advanced database security functionality, like Oracle Advanced Security and Oracle Database Vault.
Last year was a busy year for Oracle/SAP Development as well as for the Oracle/SAP Support and Services team.Numerous new Oracle features, tools and methodologies have either been developed or integrated into SAP solutions.In this edition, we describe some of the most important new technologies and the benefits they offer to SAP customers.
One of the biggest challenges today is the rapid growth in database size. In addition to Oracle Database technologiesthat have been available for several years like Bitmap Indexing or variable length storage for all data types, now SAPon Oracle customers can utilize Index Key Compression to save disk space.
Huge amounts of data continue to increase and threaten systems performance. Oracle offers a rich collection ofpartitioning strategies to reduce I/O and improve performance. SAP BI customers have known the benefits for manyyears. Thanks to tools and a methodology developed by the Oracle/SAP Support and Services team, Oracle Partitioning
is now available for SAP ERP systems as well.
Compliance and security are more important than ever before. Therefore, Oracle Advanced Security, an Oracle DatabaseOption that allows customers to encrypt data, has been certified with SAP applications and implemented by customers.
Oracle Database Vault, a product that helps customers meet regulatory compliance requirements by enforcing separationof duty.
Customers are always concerned about manageability. We discuss SAP DBA Cockpit for Oracle; in particular it’s useof Oracle Automatic Workload Repository (AWR). AWR automatically stores workload and performance statistics,so administrators and support engineers can analyze and quickly resolve performance issues, even if the root causehappened hours or days before.
In this edition, you will learn more about these features and selected customer success stories. See more informationat http://oracle.com/sap. We welcome your comments and questions, contact us at: [email protected]
Sincerely
Gerhard KupplerSenior Director Corporate SAP AccountOracle Corporation
1Oracle for SAP – The #1 Database safe, re l iable, scalable, optimized for SAP customers
I N T R O D U C T I O N
Oracle Database 10g is the first database designed forEnterprise Grid Computing to lower hardware costsby leveraging low cost components and by greatlyincreasing resource utilization levels, therefore com-plementing the Advanced Computing Infrastructureconcept of SAP.Oracle Database 10g Release 2 is available to SAPcustomer for 24 months now and is rapidly been usedby SAP customers. The following provides a list ofimportant features available to SAP customers today.
Multiple Oracle Patch (MOPatch) Utility
The Maintenance of single patches for databases onUnix and Linux platforms can be a time-consumingand complex job when dealing with many SAPinstallations. Also the experience from many supportcalls especially in the area of database performanceshows that many databases are not always at a currentpatch level. To help database administrators in theseareas a new patch utility MOPatch was developedto guarentee that an Oracle database for the SAPapplication always uses the most current set of patchescertified by SAP. SAP note 1027012 provides moredetails on how to use MOPatch.
Index Key Compression
This feature allows B*Tree Indexes to be stored moreefficiently on disk and in main memory which reducesdisk space and improves query performance. Up to70% of space for indexes can be saved on disk andquery performance may improve by up to 30%.SAP Note 1109743 provides more details on howthe index compression feature should be used in SAPenvironments.
Instant Client
Instant Client allows you to run your applicationswithout installing the standard Oracle client orhaving an ORACLE_HOME. OCI-based applicationslike SAP work without modification, while usingsignificantly less disk space than before.
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U P D A T E O N O R A C L E 1 0g D A T A B A S E F U N C T I O N A L I T Y ,
R E A L A P P L I C A T I O N C L U S T E R S A N D O R A C L E 1 1 g
F O R S A P O U T L O O K
With the release of new SAP kernels 4.6D_EX2 and6.40_EX2 the Instant Client is now available for allSAP versions starting from 4.6C on. Please refer toSAP Notes 1086956 and 1058988 for more details.
Advanced Security Network Encryption
Oracle Advanced Security Network Encryption pro-vides an easy-to-deploy and comprehensive solutionfor protecting communication to and from the OracleDatabase using both standards based networkencryption, and robust native encryption/integrityalgorithms.Network Encryption between ABAP and Java Appli-cation Servers and the Oracle Database is availablefor all SAP products based on NW2004s.
Advanced Security Transparent Data Encryption (TDE)
Makes encryption of sensitive data simple by trans-parently encrypting data when it is written to disk.
Rename Tablespace
You can now rename a tablespace. You no longerhave to create a new tablespace, copy the contentsfrom the old tablespace, and drop the old tablespace.This feature makes it easier, for example, to convert adictionary-managed tablespace to a locally managedtablespace, or to add a tablespace to a database thatalready contains a tablespace with the same name,an operation being used in a MCOD environment.
Online Segment Shrink
This feature shrinks segments of tables and indexesonline and in-place that have free space in them,thereby enhancing efficiency of space utilization.
End-to-End Application Tracing
The feature simplifies the debugging of performance problems in multi-tier enviroments. It will only beavailable for new versions of the SAP software andnot for existing versions.
Online LONG to LOB Migration
In this release tables with LONG and LONG RAWdata, still used by many SAP applications, can nowbe migrated online to LOB data from within theBR*SPACE utility of SAP.
10D A T A B A S E
g
Automatic Optimizer Statistics Collection
This feature automates the collection of optimizerstatistics for objects. Objects with stale or no statisticsare automatically analyzed, so administrators no longerneed to keep track of what does and what does notneed to be analyzed, nor to perform analysis by hand.
Change-Aware Incremental Backup
By using a new type of log file to track blocks thathave changed in the database, RMAN can avoidscanning the entire datafile during an incrementalbackup. Instead, the amount of data scanned isproportional to the amount of data changed.
Flashback Database
The Flashback Database feature provides a way toquickly revert entire Oracle database to the state itwas in at a past point in time. It is also possible to bringa single table back in time. SAP Note 1125923provides more detail on the usage of this featurein SAP environments.
Data Pump Export and Import Utilities
The Data Pump Export and Import utilities providevery high-speed bulk movement of data and metadatafrom one database to another. These utilities offerseveral significant advantages over the original Exportand Import utilities, including: the ability to com-pletely restart export and import jobs; the ability todetach from and reattach to long-running jobs; theability to estimate how much space an export jobwould consume; support for export and import opera-tions over the network; and support for fine-grainedobject selection, based upon objects and objects types.This feature will initially not be integrated within theSAP administration tools.The new Data Pump Export and Import utilities caneach be run in parallel, resulting in better performancein loading and unloading data and metadata.
Cross-Platform Transportable Tablespaces
The transportable tablespace feature now enablestablespaces to be transported across different plat-forms therefore making a platform migration for aSAP customer much faster.
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Full Database Begin Backup Command
It is no longer necessary to issue a separate commandto place each tablespace in hot backup mode. You cannow use the ALTER DATABASE statement to placeall tablespaces in backup mode. Also, the BEGINBACKUP command now runs faster than before.
NEW FUNCTIONALITY WITH SAP BI 7.0
SAP BW users will benefit most from the newfeatures describes in this section. These features areimmediately available to all SAP BI customers.
Faster Drop and Truncate Table
These two operations perform substantially faster byusing improved algorithms in accessing the databasebuffer cache. In particular small tables, often used bySAP BW, benefit the most.
In Memory Undo
Block changes by short transactions are now managedbetter by the database server resulting in less CPUcycles.
Improved Scalability for Partitioned Objects
Dropping partitioned tables and indexes is nowsubstantially faster by using a new algorithm foridentifying the blocks of a partitioned object in thebuffer cache and for cleaning these blocks in thebuffer cache. The SAP BW application benefits themost, as dropping partitioned objects is a frequentlyused operation in SAP BW.Tests performed using a query on a table with 1,000partitions show that Oracle 10g’s new strategy ofsharing partitioning metadata results in less SQLmemory usage in the SGA (9.2.0.6: 52KB, 10.2:11KB) – this means that every single query on thistable will use 5 times less memory.
ODM Connector 2.1
Oracle Data Mining Connector 2.1 leverages alladvanced Data Mining algorithms from OracleDatabase 10g Data Mining Option. Oracle DataMining Connector 2.1 is fully integrated with theAnalysis Process Designer providing a secure, scalableand indatabase analytics engine for both BW 3.5 andBI 7.0 customers (see page 61).
Oracle 10g Update for SAP
Oracle 10g Update for SAP 4
O R A C L E 1 0 g 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 )
Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) allows OracleDatabase to run any packaged or custom application,unchanged across a set of clustered servers. Thisprovides the highest levels of availability and themost flexible scalability. To keep costs low, even thehighest end systems can be built out of standardized,commodity parts. Oracle 10g RAC provides a foun-dation for Oracle’s Enterprise Grid ComputingArchitecture.Oracle RAC technology enables a low-cost hardwareplatform to deliver the highest quality of service thatrivals and exceeds the levels of availability and scala-bility achieved by the most expensive, mainframeSMP computers. Oracle 10g RAC is available on allplatforms for SAP versions 4.6C and on.
Integrated Clusterware
Oracle 10g RAC offers a complete clusterware manage-ment solution as an integral component of Oracle10gRAC available on all platforms Oracle10g Databaseruns on. This clusterware functionality includesmechanisms for cluster connectivity, messaging andlocking, cluster control and recovery, and a servicesprovisioning framework. No 3rd party clusterwaremanagement software need be purchased. Oracle will,however, continue to support selected 3rd partyclusterware products on specified platforms.With Oracle 10g Database Release 2, Oracle providesa High Availability API so that non-Oracle processescan be put under the control of the high availabilityframework within Oracle Clusterware.
SAPCTL
Oracle Clusterware does provide high availabilityfor SAP resources just as it does for Oracle resources.Oracle has created an Oracle Clusterware tool, SAPControl (SAPCTL), to enable you to easily manageSAP high availability resources. SAPCTL providesan easy-to-use interface to administer the resources,scripts, and dependencies of Oracle Clusterware andSAP high availability components. SAPCTL consoli-dates the functionality of the Oracle command-linetools by enabling you to easily manage the SAPEnqueue Service for ABAP and JAVA, the SAPReplication Service for ABAP and JAVA, and the
additional virtual IP addresses used by the SAPEnqueue Service for ABAP and/or JAVA.With the introduction of SAPCTL no 3rd party soft-ware is needed to manage and control SAP Enqueueand Replication Service, from 6.40 based systems ofSAP and upwards (as of today, available only forLinux and AIX).
Additional Support for EMC Celerra NFS Servers
In addition to the already SAP certified NetApp NFSservers for SAP/RAC deployments on Linux platformsnow SAP customers can use EMC NAS Celerrasystems using NFS.
Single System Image Management
Oracle 10g Enterprise Manager has been significantlyenhanced to enable true single system image mana-gement of cluster database deployments. EnterpriseManager’s Cluster Database Page provides a singleview of system status across multiple nodes. It alsoenables direct drill down to individual instances whenneeded.A new cluster configuration verification tool andimprovements in the diagnostic tools first introducedin the Oracle9i Database release help users bothavoid problems and resolve problems more quicklyshould they occur.
Data Guard Integration for Disaster Recovery
With Oracle 10g Enterprise Manager, the manage-ment component of Oracle Data Guard, Data GuardBroker, is now completely integrated with RAC.Data Guard disaster recovery environments involvingOracle RAC databases can now be as easily managedas those employing single instance databases.
F E AT U R E S T O B E R E L E A S E D
S O O N B Y S A P
Database Vault
Database Vault provides strong internal controls forregulartory Compliance and protection against insiderthreats. By implementing Database Vault a DBA isno longer able to see user data. Database Vault willbe available to all SAP customers in the second half of 2008 with 10.2.0.4 running 700 kernel basedapplications of SAP such as ECC 6.0 or BI 7.0.
10D A T A B A S E
g
11gD A T A B A S E
C O N C L U S I O N
Oracle 10g Database provides the necessary infra-structure for making the SAP landscape more respon-sive to the changing business environment. Oracle 10gDatabase gives you the flexibility you need to imple-ment Enterprise Grid Computing, even using lowcost servers and disks. The design of Enterprise GridComputing complements the Adaptive ComputingInfrastructure concepts of SAP. Oracle 10g Databaseprovides the benefit of lowering risks with lowermanageability costs, greater scalability and predicta-bility and the highest level of availability.
O R A C L E D ATA B A S E 1 1 g F O R S A P
O U T L O O K
Oracle Database Release 11g is currently beeingtested by SAP.
As with previous certifications SAP will certify OracleDatabase 11g Release 2 with their products. Thereare features of Oracle 11g which will greatly benefitSAP customers. Below you’ll find a list of featureswhich are currently planned by SAP, once Oracle 11gis certified by SAP or shortly after:
Secure Files
Secure Files implements a new architecture forstoring unstructured data and will replace the LOBdatatypes of previous database versions. Secure Filesdeliver improved performance and scalability overLOBs and offers additional functionality to savedisk space.
Optimizer Enhancements and Statistics Maintenance
The 11g Optimizer provides performance enhance-ments for complex SAP BI queries and betterrecognizes value changes in R/3 SQL statements.Statistics maintenance especially for partitionedobjects is improved and calculation of statistics ismore accurate and faster compared to previousdatabase versions.
Automatic Interval Partitioning
Maintenance of partitioned objects is now fullyautomatic as the database server will manage parti-tions on the fly.
OLTP Table Compression
As part of the Advanced Compressed Option tabledata may be compressed reducing disk space and
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improving query performance. In combinationwith index key compression and Secure File com-pression every type of data in the Oracle databasecan now be stored in a compressed way.
Secure File Compression
In addition to relational table data also unstructureddata may be compressed. In the Oracle database.Secure File compression is part of the AdvancedCompression Option.
ASM and ASM File System
ASM implements an Oracle volume manager tomanage data efficiently on storage subsystems.While ASM is intended only for databases the ASMfile system provides the same functionality fornon-database data which is for instance needed todeploy RAC with SAP.
SAP AG has participated in Oracle Database BetaPrograms for many years. The joint Oracle and SAPdevelopment teams in Walldorf, Germany, havecompleted extensive tests of Oracle Database 11gRelease 1 Beta and will continue testing with OracleDatabase 11g Release 2 Beta.
The release strategy of SAP AG for Oracle Databaseversions is to certify only the terminal release of anew database version. This strategy is based on theoverall requests of the SAP customer community tominimize the number of version upgrades in complexSAP environments. It has been proven a successfulroll out process with previous terminal release certi-fications of Oracle Database Versions 8i, 9i and 10g.
Therefore, SAP AG will skip Oracle Database 11gRelease 1 and certify Oracle Database 11g Release 2,at least 12 months before Oracle Database Release10g goes into the extended support cycle. Oracle Database 11g Release 2 will contain variousspecific functionality designed and implemented forthe needs of the SAP Application Product Suite.
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Oracle Database Vault
Regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX),Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard(PCI), and the Healthcare Insurance Portabilityand Accountability Act (HIPAA) require stronginternal controls to protect sensitive informationsuch as financial, healthcare and credit cardsrecords from unauthorized access and modifica-tion. Oracle Database Vault provides a power-ful and easy-to-use security solution inside theOracle Database, enabling enterprises with newand existing applications to easily complywith these and future regulations. Insiderthreats are an increasing concern for customersworldwide. The CSI/FBI 2005 ComputerCrime and Security study documented thatmore than 70% of information system datalosses and attacks have been perpetrated byinsiders, that is, by those authorized at leastsome level of access to the system and its data.Complying with regulations and protectingagainst the insider threats requires two pri-mary enhancements to existing environments:
• Preventive controls to restrict unauthorizedaccess to sensitive data by highly privilegedusers.
• Flexible and adaptable controls over who,when, where and how applications, data-bases and data can be accessed. OracleDatabase Vault Realms, Factors, and Rules(described below) work together inside thedatabase to restrict access from even themost powerful users without interferingwith the normal day-to-day database ad-ministration. These features can be used ina flexible and adaptable manner to enforcesecurity requirements, without changingthe existing applications.
Highly Privileged User Controls
IT administrators, database administrators,and application administrators fill highlytrusted positions within the enterprise.However, regulatory compliance, outsourcing,application consolidation and increasingconcerns over insider threats have resulted inan almost mandatory requirement for strongcontrols on access to sensitive application data.
Retrofitting existing application code with newaccess controls can be costly and time con-suming, and is not an option for many enter-prises. With Oracle Database Vault Realms,enterprises can restrict highly privileged users,even the powerful DBA, from accessing appli-cation data. Realms are easily defined and canbe placed around an entire application or set oftables quickly and easily.
Oracle Database Vault provides strong internal controls for regulatory compliance and
protection against insider threats. Oracle Database Vault not only prevents highly privileged
users from viewing sensitive application data, it also enforces policies on who, when,
where and how applications, databases and data can be accessed. Oracle Database Vault
transparently protects database applications without requiring any changes to the existing
application.
O R A C L E D A T A B A S E V A U LT F O R S A P C E R T I F I C A T I O N
Realms
Separation of Duty
Command
Rules
Reports
Multi-FactorAuthorization
Figure 1: Oracle Database Vault Overview
Oracle Database Vault for SAP 7
Flexible and Adaptable
Oracle Database Vault Rules and Factors signifi-cantly tighten application security by limitingwho, when, where and how databases, data andan applications can be accessed. Multiple factorssuch as IP address and authentication methodcan be used in a flexible and adaptable mannerto enforce authorization requirements, withoutrequiring changes to the existing applications.For example, access to the database could berestricted to a specific middle tier. Commandrules can be defined for all SQL commands toprovide additional control.
Separation of Duty
Oracle Database Vault provides powerfulseparation of duty controls and protects thedatabase from unauthorized changes. OracleDatabase Vault provides three distinct respon-sibilities out-of-the-box for security admini-stration, account management, and resourcemanagement. For example, Oracle DatabaseVault blocks a DBA with the create userprivilege from creating a new user if the DBAdoesn’t have the proper responsibility. You canfurther subdivide the resource administrationresponsibility into backup, performance andpatching responsibilities. Optionally, respons-ibilities can be consolidated.
SAP ERP Validation in process
Oracle has validated Oracle Database Vaultwith SAP applications.
Figure 2: Oracle Database Vault Realms, Rules and Factors
Oracle/SAP Development have startedthe SAP certification with DatabaseVault. For that reason, we would liketo collect the SAP customer names whoare interested in using this product.Prerequisites are:
• existing production customer withSAP on Oracle
• installation has to be on Oracle 10.2• installation has to be on SAP ERP
2005 (no older versions).If you are are interested in participatingin the SAP pilot program for DatabaseVault and the installation meets the re-quirements, please send us the followinginformation to [email protected]
• SAP release level customer isrunning on
• Oracle release level customer isrunning on
• Operating System
SAP/Oracle Development will
contact you shortly.
DBA
HR
Fin
Fin Realm
HR Realm
select * fromHR.employees
create user...
HR DBA
FIN DBA
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the compliance requirements resulting from a deluge ofprivacy and corporate governance regulations.
The latter include Sarbanes-Oxley, PCI, HIPAA, Gramm-Leach Bliley, the Japanese Privacy Act, BASEL II, andmuch more.
5. Who are super and privileged users?
Privileged users are users who have been granted powerfulprivileges or administrative roles within the database.Such users are generally administrators, but can be devel-opers who are given access to the system for applicationdevelopment, partners who are given such privileges forapplication integration, or even an analyst who has accessto database development tools such as Oracle Discoverer.A super user is the highest level of privileged user, often-times with SYSDBA access.
6. What else does Oracle Database Vault do?
In addition to that described above, Oracle Database Vaultprovides a web based management console that can be usedto configure and manage the offering. Database Vaultprovides a dashboard to allow for monitoring of policiesand configuration setup. Finally, Oracle Database Vaultships over three (3) dozen out-of-the box reports to showwho has access to what, helping to demonstrate proof ofcompliance.
7. Is Oracle Database Vault the same as Oracle Audit
Vault?
No. Oracle Audit Vault is a new product from Oraclefocuses on securing and consolidating audit data. OracleDatabase Vault and Oracle Audit Vault are intended toco-exist in the enterprise to assist customers with security,compliance, and privacy needs.
8. Does Oracle have partners signed up to support
Oracle Database Vault?
Yes, Oracle has been working closely with a number ofpartners. These include global System Integrators (SIs)with risk management and security practices andIndependent Software Vendors (ISVs) who plan to leverage
Q & A O R A C L E D A T A B A S E V A U L T
W H A T I S O R A C L E D A T A B A S E V A U L T ?
1. What is Oracle Database Vault?
Oracle Database Vault is a database security option thatyou use to protect application data from DBA access,enforce protection of database structures from unauthorizedchange, and set a variety of access controls to implementdynamic and flexible security requirements. These featureshelp you to adhere to standards for separation of duties,regulatory compliance, and internal control. You configureOracle Database Vault to manage the security for an in-dividual Oracle database instance. You can use OracleDatabase Vault on standalone Oracle Database installationsand in Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) environ-ments.
2. Where can I get online information about
Oracle Database Vault?
http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/
products/database_vault/index.html
3. What Oracle software is required to run Oracle
Database Vault?
Oracle Database Vault requires Oracle Database 10gEnterprise Edition.
4. What is driving security requirements for IT
organizations today?
There are two macro issues driving security requirementsfor IT organizations today:
How to protect against the “insider threat” — attackfrom within an organization by rogue individuals withprivileges who are thought to be trustworthy, but proveotherwise and the need to put in place controls to address
Q & A Oracle Database Vault 9
Oracle Database Vault to better secure and help addresscompliance requirements with their solutions. Examplesof these partners include Protivity and BearingPoint aswell as ArcSight, LogicalApps, Lumigent, Mantas, Tripwire,Vormetric and SAP.
9. How does Oracle Database Vault help customers
achieve separation of duty?
Oracle Database Vault helps customers achieve separationof duty by creating different responsibilities to managethe different aspects of the database environment. OracleDatabase Vault creates responsibilities for managing secu-rity, managing user accounts, and managing databaseresources. Separation of duty helps customers prevent un-authorized access to business data. Preventing unauthorizedaccess to business data is a crucial requirement for manyregulations such as SOX, Basel II, HIPAA, Graham-Leach-Bliley, PCI, and J-SOX (Japan). By creating separation ofduty in the database, Oracle Database Vault helps customersachieve better internal control on who does what andwhen in the database which is also part of the regulatorycompliance requirements.
10. What performance overhead does Oracle Database
Vault incur on the database?
Our TPC-C benchmark testing showed that DatabaseVault has a minimal overhead of less than 1%. Customersshould test their custom security settings for performanceand try to make them as simple as possible. Normal data-base tuning still applies when Database Vault is installed.
11. Does Database Vault require a separate database?
No. Oracle Database Vault is an option to the OracleDatabase Enterprise Edition. It can be enabled on anyOracle Database Enterprise Edition release 10.2. andabove.
12. Does Oracle Database Vault require Oracle Real
Application Clusters (RAC)?
No. However, you can use Database Vault in Oracle RealApplication Clusters (RAC) environments (tbc by SAP).
13. How does Oracle Database Vault enforce these
security mechanisms?
Oracle Database Vault introduces several new concepts:
Realm – A container that serves as a “protection zone”. The Database Vault administrator can create a Realm anddefine the content within the realm. This realm can becomprised of database objects such a single table, multipletables or an entire application, or multiple applications Command Rules – A collection of rules that you cancreate to control how users can execute almost any SQLstatements, including SELECT, ALTER SYSTEM, databasedefinition language (DDL), and data manipulation language(DML) statements. Command rules can work with rule setsto determine whether or not the statement is allowed.Rule sets use factors such as time of day, IP address, hostname, or any number of identifiable attributes associatedwith the user.
For example, a user will only be granted access to certaindata if the command rules states that access to the appli-cation is restricted to working hours, from an internal IPaddress, and/or any other number of configurable parame-ters. These restrictions can be applied to all system users,including the most powerful DBAs. Multi-Factor Authorization – Rule sets that leverage mul-tiple factors in their decision process. Security administrator‘scan define rules that are based on specific compliancerequirements or security requirements. For example, limitingconnections to a specific IP or range of IP addresses.
14. How is Oracle Database Vault different from Virtual
Private Database?
Virtual Private Database is a fine-grained solution withinthe Database that enables customers to build customizedrow level security solutions using PL/SQL. Oracle DatabaseVault provides a higher level solution that providessecurity for the database and application, by controllingaccess of privileged users (DBAs) and implementingseparation of duty inside the database.
15. Do the existing Oracle Database Security Features
co-exist with Oracle Database Vault?
Yes. All security features available with the Oracle Data-base Enterprise Edition, for example VPD and SecureApplication Roles, work with Oracle Database Vault.In Addition, other security options, like ASO and OLS,work with Oracle Database Vault as well.
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16. Does Oracle Database Vault work with Oracle
Transparent Data Encryption (TDE)?
Yes. Oracle Database Vault works with TDE. DatabaseVault Realms, Mutli-Factor Authorization, and CommandRules provide security controls around access to databasesand applications as well as controlling activity within thedatabase through separation of duty.
17. Who can grant roles like the DBA role in a Database
protected by Database Vault?
In a Database Vault environment, if a realm protects adatabase role, then only the Realm Owner can grant thisrole to others. For example the Data Dictionary Realmprotects the DBA role. The SYS user by default is theowner of the Data Dictionary Realm and can grant theDBA role to others.
18. Can the Database Vault Administrator (owner)
see data protected by a Realm?
No. The Database Vault owner account can only setuprealms. It cannot see data protected by a realm. It alsocannot add itself to the list of authorized users for anyRealm it creates. This is part of the separation of dutythat Oracle Database Vault enforces.
19. Does Oracle Database Vault allow database
connections using Java?
Yes. Database Vault honors all connection types suppor-ted by any regular database.
20. How do you move Oracle Database Vault security
Policies from a development system to a production
system?
There are two ways to do this currently:
You can either clone the database that has Database Vaultpolicies in it, or you can use the Database Vault API tocreate your security policies in a development system andapply the same scripts to the production system when ready.
In the future we are planning to leverage Enterprisemanager Grid Control to move Database Vault securitypolicies between databases.
21. How do you apply patches in a Database that has
the Oracle Database Vault option enabled?
For each released database patch, there would be a sectiondescribing how to apply it in a Database Vault enabledDatabase.
22. Who can create new users in a Database Vault
environment?
In an Oracle Database with the Database Vault optionenabled, a new account management responsibility iscreated. Only a user with the account management res-ponsibility can create new users in a Database Vault envi-ronment. This helps customers achieve separation of duty.Separation of duty is good for regulatory compliance.
23. Would Enterprise Manager Grid Control continue to
work on a Database Vault environment?
Yes. It would continue to work. However, the restrictionsthat Database Vault put in place would apply to EM GridControl administrators as well.
24. Does Oracle Database Vault integrate with Oracle
Label Security (OLS)? Can OLS leverage Oracle
Database Vault Factors?
Oracle Database Vault integrates well with Oracle LabelSecurity (OLS). Oracle Database Vault factors can providean additional dimension in deciding the security clearanceof a user’s session. For example, let us assume a user hasbeen authorized to access sensitive data. However thesecurity administrator wants to ensure the user accessessensitive data only if he/she is in the office and connectedto the trusted network. A Database Vault factor likeNetwork Domain can be used to determine the securityclearance of a user’s database session. If the user is comingfrom the public Internet, he/she can see only non-sensitivedata. If the user is coming from the trusted network, thenthe user is allowed access to sensitive data.
25. How is Database Vault packaged?
Oracle Database Vault is an option for the Oracle Data-base Enterprise Edition. Oracle Database Vault can beinstalled into Oracle Database 10g Release 2 or higher.
11
26. Are there example business use cases for Database
Vault?
Yes. These are available on OTN athttp://www.oracle.com/technology/deploy/security/
database-security/database-vault
27. Are other Oracle Database Security Options included
in Oracle Database Vault?
Both Oracle Label Security and Oracle Advanced Securitycan be used with Oracle Database Vault, but are licensedseparately. Oracle Label Security provides the ability toturn on security clearances inside the Oracle Database andenforce multi level security. Oracle Advanced Securityprovides encryption of network traffic, strong authentica-tion and Transparent Data Encryption. Transparent DataEncryption provides key management and encryptiontransparency to applications, protecting personally identi-fiable information (PII) on disk and backup tape.
28. Can I use Oracle Database Vault to meet Sarbanes-
Oxley requirements?
Oracle Database Vault is designed to help address techni-cal security requirements found in various regulations,including Sarbanes-Oxley. Oracle Database Vault providesstrong internal controls inside the database through sepa-ration of duty and preventing the DBA from viewingapplication data.
29. How does Oracle Database Vault help address
customer compliance requirements?
Database Vault can be used by organizations as a preventivecontrol. In other words, organizations can configure Data-base Vault to prevent users with super-privileges (DBAs)from accessing application data. By instituting a control in this manner, an organizationcan demonstrate compliance with specific regulations thatrequire separation of duties among individuals accessing asystem. Such is a common requirement across a numberof regulations and is specifically called out in Section 404of Sarbanes-Oxley. Payment Card Industry regulationssuch as PCI Requirement 7 calls for restricting access tocardholder data by business need-to-know. This can beenforced with Oracle Database Vault help. Additionally,Oracle Database Vault ships with a set of pre-definedreports that show who is accessing what data and underwhat conditions. These reports offer a means by which todemonstrate proof of compliance for organizations.
30. How does Database Vault address the “insider
threat”?
Database Vault addresses the “insider threat” by enablingpowerful controls on how databases, applications and dataare accessed. In addition, Database Vault enables additionalprotections against power users in the database such asthose with super-privileges (DBAs). Database Vault placesrestrictions on what data these users can access using asecurity feature called a realm. Additionally, Database Vaultprovides command rules and multi-factor authorization tocontrol when, how, and where databases, applications anddata can be accessed.
31. What are internal controls?
Internal controls are mechanisms put in place to enforcebusiness best practices. They are generally closely associa-ted with addressing regulatory compliance requirements.Internal controls can be preventive, detective or correctivein nature. Preventive controls are designed to discourageor pre-empt errors or irregularities from occurring. Theyare generally thought to be more cost-effective thandetective controls. Oracle Database Vault serves as an auto-mated preventive control — something highly desirableby the internal audit function of companies.
32. Is there training available for Oracle Database Vault?
Yes. Oracle University has developed a training class forOracle Database Vault. This class is a two-day, instructor-led class. Customers can enroll in it. For the latest scheduleand location check the Oracle University website at:http://education.oracle.com and search for Oracle Data-base Vault.
Q & A Oracle Database Vault
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33. Where can I get more information about Oracle
Database Vault?
Visit http://www.oracle.com/goto/databasevault
for white papers, data sheets, and other materials orcontact an Oracle representative near you –http://www.oracle.com/corporate/contact/index.html
34. Does Oracle Database Vault replace the security
mechanisms?
No. Oracle Database Vault secures the database andapplication by adding security protections within thedatabase kernel, preventing direct access to the applicationtables by super-privileged users (DBAs). Oracle DatabaseVault complements any application security mechanisms.
35. Does Oracle Database Vault replace the security
mechanisms in applications?
No. Oracle Database Vault secures the database andapplication by adding security protections within thedatabase kernel, preventing direct access to the applicationtables by super-privileged users (DBAs). Oracle DatabaseVault complements any application security mechanisms.
36. Will Oracle Database Vault undergo a formal security
evaluation?
Oracle Database Vault is now undergoing a formal eva-luation under the Common Criteria security certificationprogram.
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ORACLE DATABASE SECURITY
Oracle Database Security
SAP certification has started with Database Vault.
11gD A T A B A S E
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Oracle for SAP Technology Update: Dr. Graf,Mr. Klokkers, please briefly describe how newOracle Database features and Database Optionsare adopted, tested and certified by SAP?
Dr. C. Graf: We have to distinguish betweendifferent types of features. Regarding thosedifferent feature types we have a staged certi-fication approach:
New intrinsic or very basic DB features aresupported initially with the SAP certificationof this new DB release. Examples of thosefeatures are: New Memory Management,Optimizer, Online Reorganization, RenameTBLspace, etc.
New more complex Oracle features will besupported after the required technical integra-tion has happened on a development level andfurther SAP internal testing or one or morecustomer pilot projects have been successfullycompleted. Examples for this type of featuresare: LMTS, ASSM, Automatic WorkloadRepository, Fast loader, etc.
New ‚sophisticated‘ Oracle features are onlysupported based on successful pilot customerprojects. Examples are: RAC, Oracle DataMining, ASO Features, Cross PlatformsTransportable Tablespace, ASM, etc.
The guiding principle is always to ensure amaximum of quality when a new Oracle fea-ture reaches the SAP customer base.
The testing and the certification of the firsttwo types of new Oracle features happensmainly by first testing them intensively in the
SAP/Oracle platform team. The second step isto activate those features in the Oracle databa-ses of the SAP development landscape. If thecomplexity of a feature exceeds a certain levelwe always run several pilot customer projectsbefore the feature gets generally released forthe SAP customer base.
Oracle for SAP Technology Update: How isthe collaboration between Oracle and SAP interms of certification, e.g. with Oracle 11g?
Dr. C. Graf: In the database area the collabora-tion between Oracle and SAP is very tight.We have a joint development team in Rot/-Germany with developers from both companiessitting door to door. In this joint developmentteam the integration and certification of a newOracle release, like 11g, is accomplished. Thedifferent tasks are distributed among the teammembers of the joint platform team. To do thismost effectively we are leveraging the partlycomplementary areas of expertise of the indivi-dual team members. In addition, with this teamsetup we are well connected to all other deve-lopment teams of both companies. In case ofany issues this ensures fast response and reso-lution times.
Oracle for SAP Technology Update: When anOracle Database support call is received at SAP,can you please describe the process followed toresolve the customer problem?
Dr. C. Graf: The standard process for an SAPcustomer to open a support call in any area is tocreate an OSS message. This message is pickedup by the SAP Primary Support line and, if notalready done by the customer, routed to the
I N T E R V I E W
Between Oracle for SAP Technology Update Magazine
Dr. Christian Graf, SAP AGDevelopment Manager DB Platforms Oracle, OS Platform Unix, Solaris, Tru64.
and Jan Klokkers,Senior Director, Oracle for SAP Development, Oracle Corporation.
Interview Oracle for SAP Technology Update Magazine 15
appropriate technical component (queue).If the appropriate component is not obvious afirst analysis is required to identify it. Thisprocess also applies for Oracle database supportcalls. For example, as soon as it is clear that acall is Oracle related it is sent to the Oraclequeue. Next the Oracle support experts ofSAP try to resolve the issue. Over 90% of theOracle related support calls the SAP Primarysupport provides the solution. In case this isnot possible the call is forwarded to the Deve-lopment Support level. On this level we havesupport engineers from Oracle working onsolutions. The Oracle support engineers aredirectly connected to the general Oracle supportorganization. This concept ensures that thecombined Oracle and SAP expertise is availablefor our customers in a support situation. Sincethe integration of the Oracle database into theSAP technology is so intertwined, for manyproblems it is not enough to tackle them froma pure Oracle point of view. The best supportresult is achieved if the support engineersunderstand the SAP specifics of the Oracleintegration into the SAP technology stack.Therefore, we strongly recommend that allSAP customers call the SAP support lineswith any SAP related Oracle support issues.
Oracle for SAP Technology Update: A newutility MOPatch was developed by Oracleespecially for SAP customers to simplify thepatch process. Can you please elaborate theadvantages of this utility and the feedback youhave received so far from the SAP community?
Dr. C. Graf: Oracle provides a patch set whichis a bundle of individual patches on a regularbasis. Between two patch sets it is necessary toprovide individual patches to correct problems.The maintenance of these individual patcheswith OPatch for multiple SAP systems maybecome a time-consuming and error-prone taskfor the DBA. To simplify the patch maintenancea one-step utility MOPatch (Multiple Opatch)was developed. MOPatch provides the DBAthe capability with one single command tobring the database server to the most currentpatch level. MOPatch works for both new
installations of the database software and alsoupdates to an existing database installation.MOPatch takes all available patches from theSAP Service Marketplace and automaticallyinstalls all patches, or a delta of patches to thedatabase server. MOPatch takes care of unpack-ing the patches or dealing with patch conflicts.
Oracle for SAP Technology Update: Oraclehas some interesting new database features/-options, why doesn’t SAP adopt and certifythese new features immediately for use by yourSAP customers?
Dr. C. Graf: New features usually come withnew database versions. Therefore, the use ofnew features often requires a database upgrade.However, when we talk to our customersdirectly or via the user groups we get the clearmessage that the majority of the customers wantto run upgrades as rarely as possible. Due tothis SAP and Oracle jointly decided years agoto certify, if possible, only the terminal releaseof a new Oracle release for SAP customers. Wedid that for Oracle release 9i, 10g and we willalso do it for 11g. Together with an intensivetest and certification program, for every newrelease, this leads to the observed delayed availa-bility of new Oracle features. However, weclearly believe that the gain in terms of qualityand stability and the reduced number of data-base upgrades required by far outweighs thedisadvantage. Every new database release sig-nificantly increases the logistic and the supporteffort. We reduce this effort by limiting thenumber of parallel supported database releases,this makes us more agile and more efficient inthe support area, which in turn leads to animmediate benefit for the customers.
In addition, I would like to mention that webelieve that good quality and a good technicalintegration is more important than speed. As aresult of this guiding principle we have a stagedapproach for the certification of new features,as mentioned before. Testing and runningpilot customer projects takes time which leadsto a delayed availability of those features. Aprominent example is Oracle RAC.
11gD A T A B A S E
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It took nearly 3 years until we finally had theSAP certification on all OS platforms. Duringthe pilot projects we found several issues in thedifferent stack levels of a RAC configurationthat needed to be resolved, which took sometime. However, as a result all customer projectsthat started after the certification and are inproduction today (approx. 50 customers) aresuccessful and see their expectations met.That proves that our careful approach is theright one.
Oracle for SAP Technology Update: Securityis a very important aspect to corporate custo-mers. Can you please explain which encryptiontechnologies from Oracle are available to SAPcustomers and what the roadmap is to certifyDatabase Vault?
J. Klokkers: Transparent Data Encryption(TDE) and Client-Server Network Encryptionare available to SAP customers today runningOracle 10.2 and SAP Business Suite 2005.TDE allows customer to encrypt sensitive dataon disk. Database Vault will be available withOracle 10.2.0.4 to all SAP customers runninga 7.0 kernel based system (i.e. ECC 6.0 or BI7.0) in late Q2CY2008. With Database Vaulta DBA is not able to see any SAP user data inthe database providing better compliance withregulatory rules such as Sarbanes-Oxley.
Oracle for SAP Technology Update: Theamount of data customers are storing is in-creasing at a dramatic rate and space efficientstorage mechanisms are very critical. Whichadvantages does Oracle provide and what canbe expected in the future?
J. Klokkers: In order to provide a space-efficientdatabase for SAP applications Oracle providesnumerous features.
Oracle is the only database that stores numberand varchar datatypes in variable length andnot in full length. This benefits especially anSAP BW system, making it very space efficient.Also, Unicode data is stored in variable lengthusing the UTF8 format in the database unlikeother databases that always store Unicode data
in full length. Another important technologyto save space on disk and in-memory is IndexKey Compression. This technology not onlyreduces space requirements but also improvesquery performance as it results in less physicaldisk I/O and less logical I/O to the databasebuffer cache in main memory. Index Key Com-pression is available to SAP customers withOracle 10.2.
With Oracle 11g advanced compression tech-niques for tables and Secure Files (LOB) datais provided. Redo data between primary andstandby databases can be compressed, this willreduce the bandwidth and time for the trans-port. These compression techniques are partof the new Advanced Compression Option in11g. Once 11g is certified by SAP these com-pression techniques will be available to SAPcustomers.
Oracle for SAP Technology Update: Howimportant is database performance and howdoes this affect overall SAP performance?
Dr. C. Graf: The database performance is thekey for a good overall SAP performance. If thedatabase performance is bad the whole SAPsystem performance is immediately in danger,affecting all application areas. In other words:Bad database performance easily leads to asystemic performance problem that affects thesystem in total. So, it is very important that adatabase provides the features, tuning capabili-ties and, extremely important diagnostic fea-tures that permanently keeps the database at agood performance level.
Oracle for SAP Technology Update: Whatfeatures or functions do you especially like inthe Oracle database?
Dr. C. Graf:
• One of the most positive aspects of thecurrent Oracle release (10.2) is the areaof diagnostic ability and supportability.Compared to any other database platformOracle version 10.2 offers the most sophisti-cated options for in depth analysis.
Interview Oracle for SAP Technology Update Magazine 17
• The evaluation of the data provided by theOracle Automatic Workload Repository(AWR) and the Advanced Session History(ASH) allows root cause analysis on everydesired level. This is a huge benefit forexample, every time you encounter a perfor-mance problem or any other error situation.The SAP and Oracle support lines can actvery effectively based on those features. Thissituation is hardly measurable in numbers,but proven by several statements I receivedfrom our support engineers.
• The scalability and high availability featuresprovided by Oracle RAC are nearly unique inthe market as of today. Only DB2/OS390offers something similar.
Oracle for SAP Technology Update: Whatfeatures in Oracle 11g are you most interestedin testing and certifying for use by SAPcustomers?
J. Klokkers:
- Advanced Compression Option
- SecureFiles
- Automatic Interval Partitioning
- ASM and ASM Filesystem
- Cost Based Optimizer Bind Peeking
Oracle for SAP Technology Update: Howwill these 11g features benefit SAP customersin terms of performance, manageability, scala-bility, high availability and reliability?
J. Klokkers: It is too early to provide hardfacts on how much improvement OracleDatabase 11g will provide for SAP customers.But it’s clear that Oracle Database 11g willprovide better performance for applicationssuch as SAP BI or reduce storage coststhrough more compression techniques.
Oracle for SAP Technology Update: Dr. CGraf, why is there so much time lag betweenwhen Oracle releases a new database versionand the time that SAP certifies that newrelease? For example, when Oracle releasedversion 10.1 of the database, SAP waited tocertify 10.2.
This is actual a planned and thought outprocess for the benefit of our joint custo-mers. Through our user group participationour customers made it know to us that theywere not interested in so many upgrades,which require so much planning, time andeffort. So to satisfy our customer wishes wedecided to only certify the terminal releaseof Oracle databases; ie 9.2, 10.2, 11.2.
This certification strategy keeps the num-ber of parallel supported Oracle releaseslow, which makes the whole logistics andsupport processes much easier. Every data-base release comes on a growing set of ope-rating systems, releases and processortypes. For every database release we havepatch sets, One off Patches, CPUs etc.Facing this the logistics around a databaserelease is a huge effort. The smaller thenumber of parallel supported releases, themore agile we are in regard of e.g. plat-form and patch provisioning. This finallyleads to a benefit for the customers as well.
Last but not least: I would like to draw yourattention to our SAP on Oracle page in theSAP Developer Network (SDN) and the SAPon Oracle Forum. Here you will find informa-tion and news directly from my developmentteam, including a presentation by myself the“SAP on Oracle Development Update” whichcontains information about current and up-coming projects. Here is the link to the cor-responding web page within the SAP portal:www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/ora
Oracle for SAP Technology Update:
Thank you for the interview.
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S U M M A R Y
2007 has been a busy year for Oracle/SAPDevelopment as well as for the Oracle/SAPSupport and Services team. Numerous newOracle features, tools and methodologies havebeen developed or integrated into SAP solu-tions. In this article, we describe some of themost important new technologies and thebenefits they offer to SAP customers:
One of the biggest challenges today is therapid growth of databases. In addition totechnologies that have been available forseveral years, SAP on Oracle customers cannow use Index Key Compression to save diskspace.
Huge amounts of data are a threat to perfor-mance as well. Oracle’s rich collection ofpartitioning strategies is available to reduceI/O and improve performance. The benefitshave been known to SAP BI customers formany years. Thanks to a methodology andtools developed by the Oracle/SAP Supportand Services team, Oracle Partitioning is nowavailable for SAP ERP systems as well.
Compliance and security are more importantthan ever before. Therefore, Oracle AdvancedSecurity, an option that allows customers toencrypt data, has been certified with SAPapplications and implemented by customers.Oracle Database Vault, a product that helpscustomers meet regulatory compliance re-quirements by enforcing separation of duty,has also been integrated in SAP applications.
Manageability is always an issue. We discussSAP’s DBA Cockpit for Oracle, in particular theuse it makes of Oracle’s Automatic WorkloadRepository (AWR). AWR automatically storesworkload and performance statistics, so ad-ministrators or support engineers can analyzeand quickly resolve performance issues, evenif the root cause happened hours or daysbefore.
Except for Oracle Database Vault, which isdiscussed in a separate article (page 6), alltechnologies are described in more detail inthe following sections.
D I S C S P A C E S A V I N G S :
C O M P R E S S I O N
Compression – What Is It And Why Do
We Need It?
We are witnessing an explosion in data volumesas the average size of databases triples everytwo years. Even though the cost of storage hasbeen declining, enormous growth in the volumeof data that needs to be retained online makesstorage one of the biggest elements in ITbudgets. In addition, application scalabilityand performance must continue to meet thedemands of the business – even as data volumescontinue to grow. Oracle has been working formany years to help customers cope with thesechallenges:
Implicit Compression: Oracle stores numericalvalues more efficiently than other databases.It supports bitmap indexes, which needconsiderably less disk space than traditionalindex structures. It uses a Unicode imple-mentation which stores a plain ASCII cha-racter in 1 byte (instead of 2 bytes, as is thecase with most databases). Features likethese can be called implicit compression,as they are installed and used by default, inthe background, without any administratorintervention. But whenever customersmigrate from other databases to Oracle ortest a migration from Oracle to an otherdatabase, they recognize that because ofthese features Oracle needs up to 40% lessdisk space than other databases to store agiven amount of data.
Data Compression: Data compression wasintroduced in Oracle9i Release2. An Oracle/-SAP team that tested the feature as early as2002 demonstrated up to 70% less disk spaceusage at table leveland up to 40% less disk
N E W O R A C L E T E C H N O L O G Y F O R S A P C U S T O M E R S
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space usage at the database level, and nonegative (but in many cases a positive)impact on performance. Data compressionhas been available for use in SAP BI systemssince 2003.
Index Key Compression: With data compres-sion, duplicate values in table rows (datablocks) are removed. Index key compressionworks in a similar manner in that duplicatedvalues are removed from index entries (indexblocks).
Advanced Compression: Oracle Database 11gintroduces the Advanced Compression Optionwhich helps customers significantly reducetheir overall database storage footprint for alltypes of data (structured or unstructured)and all kinds of systems (OLTP or BI).
As Index Key Compression was certified foruse in SAP environments in 2007, it will bediscussed in the next section. For more infor-mation on Advanced Compression see ourinterview with Dr. C. Graf (page 14). For anoverview of Oracle’s compression technologiesand their applicability to different types ofSAP systems see Figure 1.
Index Key Compression: Concepts and Tools
Oracle’s two major index types are B*Tree in-dexes and bitmap indexes. B*Tree indexes arethe “regular” type frequently used by OLTPwhereas bitmap indexes tend to be used pri-marily for data warehouses. As bitmap indexesare already compressed (index key values arereplaced by bitmaps), Index Key Compressionis only available for B*Tree indexes.
Key compression allows repeating values forcolumns in a B*Tree index to be replaced withshorter tokens in the index blocks. To make thathappen, index key compression requires indexesthat consist of two or more columns – a require-ment that is met by many indexes in SAP sys-tems. The compression mechanism then looksat the values of the leading columns of theindex (prefix entry) and replaces repeating valueswith shorter tokens. In other words, the com-pression mechanism breaks down the index keyinto a prefix entry (the piece that holds the re-peating values) and a suffix entry (the piece thatholds the unique or almost unique values).
New Oracle Technology for SAP Customers 19
Both pieces can consist of one column or severalcolumns (see Figure 2). Every single index blockcontains a list that specifies the original keyvalues for each token used in this block, so de-compression can be done easily.
Of course, there is no point in compressing allindexes existing in a given database. Admini-strators should look for large indexes only. Atool (PL/SQL package IND_COMP) is availablethat helps administrators find good candidates.This tool also answers the question of whichcolumns should be part of the prefix and whichones should be left for the suffix.
Index Key Compression: Advantages
What are the advantages and disadvantages ofkey compression?
Disk space savings: Customer experiencesshow that up to 75% less disk space is neededfor a single key compressed index. On aver-age, the total database size can be reducedby 30% by using key compression for thelargest indexes.
Figure 1: Oracle technologies for minimizing disk space requirements
Figure 2: Index Key Kompression.
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Oracle Partitioning (see SAP Notes 105047,742243, 722188), but it does not come with adefault setup. As a result, many SAP on Oraclecustomers were looking for help.
The main reason for partitioning not being usedby default in ERP systems is the fact that, de-pending on the modules used, different tablesshould be partitioned in different systems.To overcome this obstacle, the Oracle for SAPServices and Support team developed a metho-dology and a set of tools which can be appliedto determine the best candidates and the ap-propriate partitioning strategies. The serviceoffering has been available since 2007, andcustomers who made use of it found that itresulted in remarkable improvements.
Partitioning Schemes
Partitioning allows tables, indexes, and index-organized tables to be subdivided into smallerpieces, enabling these database objects to bemanaged and accessed at a finer level of granu-larity. Oracle provides a rich variety of parti-tioning schemes to address every businessrequirement.
Range partitioning maps data to partitionsbased on ranges of partition key values thatyou establish for each partition. It is themost common type of partitioning and isoften used with dates. In standard SAP BIinstallations on Oracle, PSA and fact tablesare range-partitioned.
List partitioning complements the functiona-lity of range partitioning. Range partitioningis useful for segmenting a table along acontinuous domain – e.g. time, so that eachpartition contains the data for a given range(week, month) of time values. In contrast,list partitioning is useful for segmenting atable along a discrete domain – e.g. locations.Each partition in a list partitioning schemecorresponds to a list of discrete values.
Hash partitioning maps data to partitionsbased on a hashing algorithm which Oracleapplies to a partitioning key that you identify.The hashing algorithm evenly distributesrows among partitions, giving partitionsapproximately the same size.
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P E R F O R M A N C E :
PA R T I T I O N I N G
Conventional wisdom has it that databases sup-porting data warehouse systems are typicallythe largest databases in an enterprise. As oneof the most challenging areas of scalability isin supporting these large data volumes, datawarehouses generally require the implementa-tion of one type or several types of partitioning.
However, many SAP customers find that thedatabase size of their ERP system(s) is equal toor even greater than the database size of theirBI system(s). SAP BI installs and uses partitio-ning by default – which gives customers a hugebenefit in terms of manageability, availability,and query performance. SAP ERP supports
I/O reduction: Compression reduces physicaldisk I/O and logical buffer cache I/O. It alsoimproves the buffer cache quality.
CPU consumption: Every compression tech-nique comes with higher CPU consumption.However, this is more than compensated forby a reduction in logical I/O for index blocksin the database buffer cache.
Overall database throughput: Customerexperiences have shown a 10%-20% impro-vement in database throughput for an SAPsystem by using index key compression in anon – CPU–bound environment.
Index Key Compression: Example
Among the candidates for key compression inSAP ERP systems is GLPCA~1. The basetable, GLPCA, consists of approximately. 100columns, 5 of which are included in the index.GLPCA~1 is a somewhat special case, as thecardinality of the stored values is in many casesso low that IND_COMP (the tool that helpswith the configuration) suggests including all5 columns in the prefix. This means that thecomplete index entries are compressed.
In one customer’s case, the original size of theuncompressed index GLPCA~1 was 18GB.By index key compression it was reduced to4.5 GB, which represents a compression ratioof 75%.
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Partitioning for SAP ERP
Customers implement Oracle Partitioning forSAP ERP for three main reasons. The first andobvious reason is the wish to improve perfor-mance. Some of the performance aspects are:
Queries need less runtime, because theamount of data to process is defined by thenumber of partitions, which have to bescanned. On a primary key access this willbe only a single partition. A few customerexamples can be found in Figure 3.
Query performance is stabilized, because thenumber of rows in a single partition is con-stant.
DML operations are executed on singlepartitions instead of on the whole table.
A second reason is partitioning for manageability.With partitioning, maintenance operations canbe focused on particular portions of tables:
Fewer index reorganizations are required,because delete operations affect only non-productive partitions.
The database buffer cache is unloaded, becausefewer table / index blocks need to be read.
As jobs finish faster, less load is generatedon the system.
Archiving will be faster, because only smal-ler partitions of the data must be scanned.
Finally, partitioned database objects providepartition independence. This characteristic canbe an important part of a high-availabilitystrategy:
Indexes can be reorganized on partition levelinstead of reorganizing the whole index.Reorganization does not affect the produc-tive partitions.
Single partitions can be reorganized insteadof the whole table.
Productive partitions (most recents) are notaffected by the archiving process.
Errors during archiving do not affect thesystem.
Oracle Database 10g – Information is Currency 21New Oracle Technology for SAP Customers 21
C O M P L I A N C E A N D
S E C U R I T Y: A S O
Oracle Advanced Security provides robustencryption solutions to safeguard sensitivedata and to address regulatory compliancerequirements. It protects your data fromunauthorized disclosure whether in transitor at rest.
Strong Protection for Sensitive Data:
Transparent Data Encryption
Transparent Data Encryption makes encryp-tion simple by embedding encryption withinthe Oracle Database itself. With a simple, onetime alter table statement, an administratorcan encrypt sensitive data within a table. Mostimportantly, SAP applications continue towork after encryption has been enabled.
Data is automatically encrypted when writtento the database files and redo log files on disk.Data is automatically decrypted for all data-base users after they have authenticated them-selves to the database and passed all additionalauthorization checks. These checks includeverifying that the user has the necessary selectand update privileges on the application table.Existing database backup routines will conti-nue to work, with the encrypted columnsremaining encrypted in the backup file.
For more information on Transparent DataEncryption see SAP Note 974876.
Strong Protection for Data in Transit:
Network Encryption
Oracle Advanced Security provides an easy-to-deploy and comprehensive solution for protec-ting communication to and from the OracleDatabase using both standards-based networkencryption, and robust native encryption/inte-grity algorithms. SSL based encryption is avai-lable for businesses that have deployed PublicKey Infrastructure.
For businesses with no PKI deployment, OracleAdvanced Security provides native encryptionand data integrity algorithms to protect datain transit. The Oracle Database can be confi-
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statistics (by default every hour). This data ismaintained for a week and then purged. Youcan then run reports against these statistics toperformance tune your database.
The Oracle database uses AWR for problemdetection and analysis as well as for self-tuning.A number of different statistics are collectedby the AWR including wait events, timemodel statistics, active session history statistics,various system and session level statistics,object usage statistics and information on themost resource-intensive SQL statements.
SAP: DBA Cockpit for Oracle
SAP’s DBA Cockpit provides a single point ofaccess to all database monitoring and admini-stration functions. Instead of having separatetransactions for the various administrationtasks, for example performance monitoring,space management and job scheduling, youcan access all these tasks using one centraltransaction. Although the well-known transac-tions like ST04 and, DB02 are still supported,it is no longer necessary to use them. Theyonly serve as shortcuts into the DBA Cockpitin, that it starts up with an appropriate screen.But DBA Cockpit for Oracle is more than justa new interface for previously existing transac-tions. The AWR Reporting section, the brandnew part, consists of reports that are based onOracle’s Automatic Workload Repository:
• AWR Report: workload report• AWR DIFF Report: compares workload
reports (difference report)• SQL Report: workload SQL report• ASH Report: active session history report• ADDM Report: automatic database diagnostic
monitor
This may sound very technical, and indeed itis. But if you run into a performance problemor any other error situation, you will immedia-tely recognize the benefits. The supportengineer who is working on your issue will beable to solve it faster, because all data he orshe needs is available. So the availability of allthose statistics will translate into less down-time for your system.
Figure 3: Benefits of Oracle Partitioning for SAP ERP. Runtime of batch jobs before (blue) and after (green)implementation of range partitioning in a real life system.
gured to reject connections from clients withencryption turned off, or optionally allowunencrypted connections for deployment flexi-bility. Configuration of network security issimplified using the Oracle Network Confi-guration administration tool, allowing busines-ses to easily deploy network encryption, as thereare no changes required in the application.
For more information on Network Encryptionsee SAP Note 973450.
Strong Protection for Backup Media:
Backup Set Encryption
In recent years, many companies have reportedthe theft or loss of backup media. While theOracle Database protects data inside the data-base, once un-encrypted data is copied offlineonto backup media, it is outside the secureperimeter of the Oracle Database. Entire back-up sets created with Oracle Recovery Manager(RMAN) can be encrypted, before data leavesthe database.
MANAGEABILITY: AUTOMATIC
WORKLOAD REPOSITORY
Oracle: Automatic Workload Repository (AWR)
In Oracle Database 10g, Oracle replaced Stats-Pack with the Automatic Workload Repository(AWR). The job of AWR is to collect database
SAP adopted in the late 1990’s as a mission-
critical system
Since its establishment in 1960, Japan Vilenehas been building all their business systemsin-house on its mainframe system. For partsof their other systems, they used systems fromvarious affiliated companies. However, in thelatter half of the 1990’s, the need to addressthe potential effects of the Year 2000 problemon their systems required them to begin con-sidering using completely independent systemsas well as system migration. “Under suchcircumstances and also driven by the call fordownsizing, the company opted to migrate toan open system instead of the previous hostsystem.” Looking back, Mr. Nakamura obser-ves, “The year 2000 issue positively triggeredthe move toward system migration.” Thecompany also made a decision to concurrentlyadopt SAP as their business system. Theyadopted SAP because it was the most completeenterprise package software available at thetime that would operate in an open system, heexplains. Although the company has adoptedOracle Database, it once considered migrationto SQL Server when migrating from UNIX toWindows. “Compared to SQL Server, we feltthere was greater operational difficulty involvedwith Oracle Database. However, eventually, wedecided to continue to use Oracle Databasebecause we were concerned about the riskinvolved in migrating to SQL Server as wellas its low level of reliability,” Mr. Nakamuraobserves. According to him, the decision reflected an outlook that Oracle Database would provide products that would be as low
in operating load as SQL Server. “Actually,I see that is what is happening. Now we areglad that we have adhered to Oracle,” Mr.Nakamura says.
Priority given to business continuity as a
material manufacturer
Japan Vilene had a medium-term plan thatincluded upgrading from SAPR/3 4.6C tomySAP ERP 2005. In the wake of this move,they also decided to build a remote backupsystem in order to implement a disaster reco-very system that had been planned for sometime in addition to implementation of a ver-sion upgrade from Oracle8i (8.1.7) to OracleDatabase 10g Release 2, and the renewal ofthe IA server.
D I S A S T E R R E C O V E R Y E N V I R O N M E N T B U I L T F O R
S E C U R I N G B U S I N E S S C O N T I N U I T Y A T M I N I M U M C O S T
B Y A D O P T I N G O R A C L E D A T A G U A R D
Oracle Database –
Information is23Oracle Data Guard at Vi lene Japan 23
Japan Vilene Company, Ltd. (“Japan Vilene”), a leading nonwoven fabric company in Japan,
implemented SAP products in the enterprise system and Oracle products for its database system in
1997. Recently, at the time of system upgrading, Japan Vilene built a disaster recovery environment by
replacing the previous server with PRIMEQUEST, a key IA server from FUJITSU LIMITED (“FUJITSU”),
and introducing Oracle Data Guard. We interviewed Mr. Mikio Nakamura, the manager in charge of
information system at the Management and Finance Department, and Mr. Tatsuya Sekiguchi, a section
head at the same department, about the series of system building processes.
24
Mr. Nakamura explains the background of thedecision to build a backup system as follows.“As a material manufacturer, Japan Vilene hasa mission to ship orders to our customer manu-facturers in a timely manner. Under thesecircumstances, we would face a serious problemif our enterprise operations experienced a failurethat resulted in suspension of order acceptancesor shipping. For example, in the case oursystem breaks down even for one day, the esti-mated damage that would be incurred wouldreach several hundred million yen (million $) interms of sales. However, the most threateningfact is the loss of trust as an enterprise, whichcannot be measured in monetary amounts. Forthis reason, they had previously taken stepssuch as duplicating the equipment and thenetwork to ensure the continuity of their busi-ness operations. Furthermore, backup measureshad been taken by means of tape media andremote safekeeping of the tape media. Mr.Sekiguchi explains the reason why they decidedto build a backup system despite such practices.“Carrying out a backup with tape media wasindeed labor-consuming. From viewpoints ofefficient backup and quick restoration in thecase of a failure, replication seemed reasonableafter all.”
The key factor for adopting PRIMEQUEST
from FUJITSU: Duplication
In the latter half of 2006 when Japan Vilenebegan studying a series of tasks for migrationand system buildup, the company examinedseveral manufacturers with regard to theirability to upgrade SAP, renew the server andcreate a backup system, and the performanceof the server itself. As a result, they selectedFUJITSU to carry out the project. Lookingback, Mr. Nakamura says, “The key factor wasthat FUJITSU had rich expertise with SAPand Oracle products. Another important factorwas that PRIMEQUEST, the IA server theyproposed, satisfied our requirements.” One ofthe great features of PRIMEQUEST is theduplex structure covering everything elseexcept the CPU, which has been built usingproprietary FUJITSU technology. According
proprietary FUJITSU technology. Accordingto Mr. Sekiguchi, it is critical to have aredundancy system for the server itself fromthe viewpoint of efficiency and stable systemoperation. “Replication can also be achievedby clustering. However, such system confi-guration is very complicated and poses a burdenon management. In order to be able to operatethe system with a limited number of personnel,as is the case with our company, the simplerthe system, the better it is. From this view-point, it is essential that the server system isin a duplex configuration in itself.”
Oracle Data Guard was adopted for its
network-friendly features
A backup system can be configured in a varietyof ways, using hardware and/or software solu-tions. Initially, FUJITSU proposed a systemconfiguration technique that did not includethe use of Oracle Data Guard. However, inthe course of discussions between JapanVilene and FUJITSU, the possibility of usingOracle Data Guard was raised. “Actually, wehave known about the Standby Database func-tion that preceded Data Guard. We have eventested it in-house. At that time, we gave upthe idea of implementing it due to financialconstraints as well as the existence of certainfunctional shortcomings. However, as we havebeen hearing recently that more and morecompanies are using the program, the producthas attracted our attention anew. While Mr.Sekiguchi was worried about the adoption ofOracle Data Guard based on the above know-ledge, his greatest concern was the issue ofthe network. “We were building a remoteenvironment at the Ibaraki Plant. However, atthe plant, only ADSL (the effective transmis-sion rate: 1 - 2 Mbps) was available due toconstraints specific to the area. Thus, we nee-ded to consider introduction of a leased line,depending on the band required. That wouldmean a steep rise in running costs as well asin implementation expenses. However, as dis-cussions progressed, it became clear that theband issue could be solved with Oracle DataGuard.
Oracle Data Guard at Vi lene Japan 25
“The important factor was what volume ofdata should be updated at what frequency.”(Mr. Sekiguchi) So Japan Vilene reviewed theallowable amount of time that could be con-sumed for system recovery required at thecompany, setting as part of the backup policythat data must be updated once every hour.Also, data volume for a file was set to 50 MBand the transfer amount was assumed to be5 – 10 files per hourly transfer task for dailyoperations. According to a simulation result,at this level, such system operations shouldcause virtually no impact on the networkwhen viewed as a one-day cycle even thoughthere would be a possibility of the occurrenceof some network delays during peak hours.
Having a backup system – A virtue in itself
In February 2007, the implementation schemewas finalized, and the actual system buildupprocess started in June of the same year. Afterrepeated tests in a virtual environment built inthe main office and the remote environmentbuilt at the Ibaraki Plant, full-scale operationof the backup system started in February 2008.In this configuration, Oracle Data Guard isused as the data transfer technology andFUJITSU provided the operational mecha-nism including hourly updating using theirproprietary know-how. At present, this backupsystem is operating in a stable state withoutadding a load on the network, as was predictedinitially. The efficacy of the implementationof the backup system cannot be evaluated un-less a failure actually occurs. The most impor-tant thing is, however, not to “use” the systemin such a situation. “A competent system isreliable. However, the important point is thatwe “have” this system, rather than we have to“use” it. The fact that we have a system toensure business continuity provides a differen-tiation factor against our competitors, whichwill promote the relationship of mutual trustbetween customers and the company. Nowthat business operations cannot exist withouta business system, a trend being noted is onein which “the level of system reliability istantamount to perceived reliability as an enter-
prise.” Given these circumstances, we canreaffirm “the significance of possessing a back-up system.” Meanwhile, Mr. Nakamura refersto cost performance. “Considering safety, wetend to input excessive amounts of investment.On the other hand, a backup system itselfdoes not generate profits. That limits compa-nies’ capacity to invest just in that. So costsmust be reduced to some extent. Consideringour backup system configuration with OracleData Guard from that viewpoint, no additionalcosts are involved as we use the standard fea-tures, except for the creation of the remoteenvironment. That means we receive excellentcost performance. We are deeply satisfied withthe fact that we were able to build a disasterrecovery environment at minimum cost,” hesays.
26
Successful changeover from 9i RAC to 10g
RAC for SAP application on AIX
Around 1,700 outlets in 20 countries, 6,000employees and 40 million pairs of shoes hand-led each year with just-in-time delivery – a fewfigures that reveal all too clearly the exactingdemands made on the IT landscape at RenoFashion & Shoes GmbH, the retail subsidiaryof the Hamm-Reno Group.
Tasked with delivering ‘high availability withzero compromise’, the IT team led by MatthiasSchaefer, Global IT Manager for the HR Group(Hamm-Reno), decided back in the late 1990sto replace the existing heterogeneous mainframesetup with an SAP system featuring Oracle 8in an HACMP cluster running on AIX. Oneof the reasons they chose Oracle, explainsMatthias Schaefer, was that experience showedthat key features were and are provided first –or exclusively – by Oracle.
In October 2001 the organization began thegradual software transition to SAP modules formaterial management in parallel with theimplementation of a Business Warehouse (BW).Within 12 months it had implemented SD(Sales & Distribution) and other materialmanagement modules. The migration to BW3.0 with an adapted data structure and paralleldatabase access was completed in early 2004and the system became productive.
During the course of 2004 the database wasupgraded to Oracle9i. At the same time theHACMP cluster was replaced with Oracle RAC(Real Application Clusters).
Much more than just one project
In spring 2007 a wide-scale release change wasundertaken. In parallel to the introduction ofnew IBM hardware, the upgrade from Oracle 9ito 10g and the changeover to ERP 2005, itwas necessary to convert to Unicode.
Because the previous 4.6C system had useddifferent code pages, converting to Unicodewas absolutely essential. In the face of ‘expert’predictions of a dramatic increase or evendoubling of system resources, the reality forthe HR Group was quite different.
“Because of the individual database structures youhave to leave the familiar path and take a ‘hands-on’ approach at various points. For example, if youknow how to parallelize by splitting extensive tables– which is by no means a standard step – theconversion will be a lot faster.”
The reorganization and restructuring of indi-ces and tables created the ‘space‘ needed in thetablespaces. The actual measurable growthturned out to be much less than ten percent.This was even despite the fact that the teamhad to export the entire database with the SAPinstallation tools and then reimport it, whichwas very time-consuming. The material mana-gement system alone amounted to almost 850gigabytes.
But, says Matthias Schaefer, you should neverbe mean with the main storage. The SAPsystem with several hundred users can quicklygobble up to 64 GB. If for paging reasons aninstance doesn’t respond fast enough, another
“With Oracle 10g and the underlying file system GPFS you no longer need to install a third
server as a quorum node, for example. For Oracle9i we used three host systems, each with
one disk system. For 10g we only needed a third hard disk, what’s known as a tiebreaker,
which controls the situation-dependent load distribution on the servers as a coordination
instance. We still use GPFS as the file system. HACMP is no longer needed.”
– M A T T H I A S S C H A E F E R ,
Global IT Manager, HR Group
Industries:
Retail, 1,700 subsidiaries
in 20 countries
Sales (worldwide):
500 M euros
Employees:
6,000
Oracle Products & Services:
• Oracle Database 10g
• Oracle Real Application
Clusters (RAC)
• Oracle Clusterware
• Oracle Support
Key Benefits
• Improvement of high
availability
• Cost reduction
• Long-term IT concept to
ensure ROI
• Streamlined DBA productivity
• State-of-the-art high avail-
ability
M U L T I P L E R E L E A S E C H A N G E A T T H E H R G R O U P
Hamm-Reno Group
Thaleischweiler-Fröschen
2727Oracle 10g RAC for SAP at HR Group
RAC server quickly takes over the task, whichof course takes up main storage capacity andcan impact on system performance. But thedemands made on the main storage by Oracleare relatively modest.
‘Tiebreak’ saves hardware resources
The conversion was completed in just underthree days on a long weekend around May 1,2007, thanks in no small part to the help of aUnicode specialist from SAP.
“With Oracle 10g and the underlying file systemGPFS you no longer need to install a third server asa quorum node, for example. For Oracle9i we usedthree host systems, each with one disk system. For10g we only needed a third hard disk, what’sknown as a tiebreaker, which controls the situation-dependent load distribution on the servers as a coor-dination instance. We still use GPFS as the filesystem. HACMP is no longer needed.”
High availability can also be easily assuredwith the Oracle Clusterware SAPCTL. In theSAP environment the Group will eventuallydispense with the HACMP solution for thestand-alone enqueue server. A test system with Oracle’s enqueue server and SAP Controlrecently won over the experts at the HRGroup and is scheduled to start automatingthe transfer of enqueue tables in the produc-tive system in November 2007 to safeguardthe system.
With AIX 5.2 ML 3 and the power CPUs,several logical partitions (LPARs) can be set upon one machine with virtual CPUs, making itpossible to dynamically expand or shrinkresources. Each partition is entitled to a mini-mum CPU capacity, which is however availableto other partitions if not required.
Never change a running system
“Put simply, the Oracle database is stable anddelivers high performance. So there’s no reason toexperiment,” says graduate computer scientistMatthias Schaefer, describing the confidence hehas developed over many years in the stability,performance and innovation of Oracle.
The parallelization of database queries throughthe automatic distribution of tasks to multipleprocessors is one of the features that no otherdatabase system can offer in such a technicallymature form.
“It would be fully understandable if users of IBMhardware with AIX also opted for DB/2. Thereare some features – including the Real ApplicationClusters (RAC) – that aren’t available there.We do see approaches that are along the same linesbut for operational, transaction-oriented environ-ments like SAP R/3 and ERP 2005 these are ofless interest. They’re more suitable for the BusinessWarehouse environment, where many users accessdata that’s seldom updated.”
Another example of Oracle’s technologicaledge, he believes, is Star Transformation, asoftware technology that enables the user to‘work rationally with very complex joins’ inthe Business Warehouse environment.
Objectively tested quality
The Hamm-Reno Group, created in 2005 byReno and the Hamm Group, founded a mana-gement company which incorporates the ITteams of both formerly independent companies.
The data center in Thaleischweiler-Fröschen,Germany, the location of Reno’s headquarters,is soon to unify and manage the entire ITlandscape of Reno Fashion & Shoes GmbH,the retail subsidiary of the Hamm-Reno Group.The corresponding applications at Hamm’shead office in Osnabrück will be graduallyintegrated into the Reno/SAP landscape.
At the end of this process the company willhave a uniform system for the entire globalholding. The farsightedness of Reno’s IT crewand the wisdom of their IT strategy certainlyhad a considerable influence on this decision.This internal vote of confidence in the Renodata center was confirmed by neutral qualityaudits carried out by Price WaterhouseCoopers and experts at SAP Hosting.
Matthias Schaefer,Global IT Manager,HR Group
28
S T A E D T I S C H E S K L I N I K U M M U N I C H : O R A C L E 1 0 g
R A C F O R S A P – T H E G U A R A N T E E F O R A N E W
F A I L S A F E S A P E N V I R O N M E N T
The merger of five hospitals to form Staedti-
sches Klinikum Munich GmbH included exten-
sive IT consolidation: The five previous SAP
environments were merged into one. Oracle
10g RAC for SAP is an indispensable corner-
stone in failsafe applications in the company’s
new system landscape.
Hospital merger – IT consolidation
Staedtisches Klinikum Munich GmbH cameabout when five hospitals in the state capitalof Munich were combined. The new companyincludes the facilities in Bogenhausen, Neu-perlach, Harlaching, Schwabing and Thal-kirchner Strasse. The institute for nursing,blood donor service and central laundry werealso incorporated. With around 3600 beds, 260day clinic places and 6800 employees, the hugeclinical center is currently the largest providerof healthcare services in southern Germany andone of the largest municipal hospital companiesin the country.
It goes without saying that the merger broughtwith it major IT changes, the main one beingthat the new company was to use one largeconsolidated central SAP environment in placeof the five previous ones. As a result a totallynew infrastructure landscape for SAP operationshad to be set up. “In terms of the architectureconcept, firstly we were able to make full useof our previous experience with SAP operations.Secondly we had to take account of a largenumber of conditions that arose from the esta-blishment of the large clinical center.
These two facts produced a catalog of require-ments in which the priorities were improvedstability, scalability, flexible operations, in-vestment protection and low operating costs,”explains Karlheinz Breit, Head of IT Infra-structure and Services at Staedtisches KlinikumMunich GmbH. The core application systemused is SAP R/3 IS-H and i.s.h.med (version4.7.2). The clinic is also using SAP BW (Busi-ness Intelligence) and HR (Human Resources).
Even brief downtimes are not acceptable
“Improved stability” in SAP applications arekey to Munich’s large clinical center. Whilespecial sub-systems are used in some areas,such as cardiology, the patient data from theseareas is also incorporated for diagnosis andfindings in the central key SAP component,i.s.h.med; all patient data and records are pro-cessed in the same system. “This core applica-tion must never fail. If operations ceased foreven a couple of hours, the work of the clinicwould be seriously disrupted. Under certaincircumstances, we may even no longer be ableto provide emergency services,” stresses ITexpert Breit.
The central SAP landscape that has been in usesince the start of 2008 allows for stable systemoperations at Staedtisches Klinikum Munichin terms of both hardware and software. Thesophisticated system concept sees the databaseserver, application server and memory systemsredundant and duplicated at two sites.
“The priorities for our new SAP environment were high availability, scalability and flexibility.
With Oracle 10g RAC for SAP, we have implemented a future-oriented SAP operating concept,
delivering several tangible benefits.”
– K A R L H E I N Z B R E I T ,
Head of IT Infrastructure and Services,
Staedtisches Klinikum Munich GmbH
Staedtische Kliniken Munich
GmbH
Industry:
Healthcare
Workforce:
Around 6800
Number of beds:
Approx. 3600
Oracle Products & Services:
• Oracle Database10g Release 2
• Oracle 10g RAC for SAP
• Oracle OCFS
• Oracle Support
Key Benefits:
• Sophisticated high availability
• Distinct scaling possibilities
• Performance optimization
• High investment protection
• Opportunities for increasing
cost efficiency
29Oracle 10g RAC for SAP at Staedtisches Kl inikum Munich
The hardware is X86 standard server blades(BX620) from Fujitsu-Siemens, includingFlexFrame technology. The storage systemscame from Hitachi (HDS 55). The operatingsystem platform is Linux SLES 10.
The Oracle 10g database is used along withOracle RAC for SAP (2 x 2 nodes). As Mr.Breit,the head of IT infrastructure, explains, “Highavailability, but also scalability, is achieved inan optimum and very distinct way, through acombination of FlexFrame and Oracle RealApplication Clusters for SAP.”
RAC launched in record time
Should problems arise, technical availability ofthe core applications is ensured within two tothree minutes. For example if hardware in datacenter 1 fails, data center 2 takes over its tasks.And if a database node isn’t available, for ex-ample, others (including the RAC node in datacenter 2) take on its functions. In a nutshell“Oracle RAC guarantees us stable SAP opera-tions,” stresses Breit.
The important thing for him is that databaserecovery of three to four hours is made obso-lete through the use of Oracle database cluste-ring technology and that there is no scope forthe high availability to be interrupted. Thisensures that treatment is always recorded in theSAP system. If this didn’t happen, the com-pany would suffer real financial consequences.Furthermore, the 2500 or so concurrent users(approx. 6000 SAP accounts, mainly workingshifts) are never “aware”, so to speak, of thesystem being down.
The IT department at Staedtische KlinikenMunich introduced Oracle 10g RAC for SAPin collaboration with its partners SiemensMedical Solutions/SBS, Fujitsu-Siemens andthe service provider and Oracle partner IS4ITin a record time of just four weeks. Accordingto Mr. Breit, “The support we received fromIS4IT and the high quality of Oracle RAC forSAP were key to us being able to implement theOracle solution in such a short time. Duringthe launch, the Oracle support team didn’tmake a single mistake.”
Fast ROI, a solution fit for the future
The combination of X86 standard hardware inthe form of blades with FlexFrame, Linux andOracle RAC for SAP is paying off several timesover for Staedtisches Klinikum Munich. Thenew system landscape satisfies all the require-ments listed at the start. Various old systemscan now be quickly migrated to the new plat-form. The new system environment will haveno problems coping with the intended changeto SAP ERP (ECC 6.0) and proving itself as afuture-proof solution that can be extended atany time.
Despite the redundant system design, theinvestment is worth it. Not including the costsof money transfer, depreciation and staffingsavings, the return on investment (ROI) isaround just 15 months. And what makes all thedifference is that the hardware maintenancecosts have been cut by no less than 94 percent.
Also with Oracle RAC for SAP, performance isnoticeably enhanced when compared with theprevious setup. Head of IT infrastructureKarlheinz Breit adds, “All the hospitals aretelling us that the response times are great.”
“High availability, but
also scalability, is
achieved in an optimum
and very distinct way,
through a combination
of FlexFrame and Oracle
Real Application
Clusters for SAP.”
– KARLHEINZ BREIT,
Head of IT Infrastructure and
Services, Staedtisches Klinikum
Munich GmbH
30
Since the European utilities industry wasliberalized in the early to mid-‘90s, it has beenswept by mergers and acquisitions. To this day,the European energy sector remains awash withactivity. One major player in the expansiongame lies in Italy: Gruppo Hera, a Bologna-based corporation formed in November 2002from 12 local utilities in the Emilia-Romagnaregion (6 provinces total). Its latest acquisition:Meta Modena, in 2006. Hera now has € 2.1billion in revenues, 6.000 employees and over2.5 million customers whom it supplies withenergy, water and waste management services.Currently, the utility company ranks third inthe Italian market. But that’s about to change.
For Hera, one technology stood head andshoulders above the rest in ensuring businesscontinuity and high availability for its first-level enterprise applications: Oracle RealApplication Clusters. Its mission-criticalapplications are the industry solution SAP IS-Uand the business intelligence system SAP BW.
Hera views a robust, well-engineered ITenvironment as the key to its past accomplish-ments and future plans. “You see, IT is abusiness backbone for our company. All ourfirst-level enterprise software applications haveto work flawlessly. If they go down – even fora short time – our company would have aserious problem,” explained Managing DirectorPiera Fasoli from Famula @on-line S.p.A., whois responsible for Gruppo Hera’s IT activities.Systems and Architecture Manager FabrizioGrisoni added, “That’s right. We wouldn’t beable to do a lot of things – like issuingcustomer invoices on time or in the rightquantities. And that would cut directly intoour revenues.”
“It’s very important for us that our mission-critical applications run smoothly. With Oracle
Real Application Clusters, we have the assurance we need that these software systems
will remain highly available. Not only that, but the database clustering technology has
helped us achieve major increases in productivity and efficiency.”
– P I E R A F A S O L I ,
Managing Director, and Fabrizio Grisoni,
Systems and Architecture Manager
O R A C L E R A C I S T H E F I R S T C H O I C E F O R
B U S I N E S S C O N T I N U I T Y F O R M I S S I O N - C R I T I C A L
A P P L I C A T I O N S Gruppo Hera, Bologna
www.gruppohera.it
Industry
Utility Services
Annual Revenue
Over € 240 million
€ 2.1 billion (2006)
Employees
Approx. 6,000
Oracle Products & Services
Oracle Real Application Clusters9.2.0.7 (on Solaris 9)Oracle-To-Oracle (O2O)Transition Services Set Oracle DB Physical PartitioningOracle Consulting ServicesOracle Support
Key Benefits
– Implementing Oracle RealApplication Clusters toenhance the availabilityof the enterprise solutionsSAP R/3 IS-U, SAP BW
– Boosting mission-criticalapplication performance,especially for the industrysolution R/3 IS-U
– Improving response timeswith the IS-U and Oracle DBPartitioning
– Basis for enhanced systemscalability and flexibility inresource deployment
3131Oracle RAC for SAP at Gruppo Hera
“No Other Technology Compares“
With its current IT environment with OracleRAC, Hera feels eminently equipped to tacklethe full range of current and future businesschallenges. “We’re well equipped for furthercorporate growth because our current IT archi-tecture and applications perfectly meet a widevariety of requirements. And Oracle RAC isone of the key elements in this mix,” explainedIT system and architecture expert FabrizioGrisoni.
The Hera application environment has evolvedcontinuously over the years, passing throughthree distinct stages. When the company wasfounded in 2002, it first deployed SAP R/3as the enterprise solution, based on Oracleas the database management system. The solu-tion consisted of the modules for FinancialAccounting (FI), Controlling (CO), MaterialsManagement (MM), Sales and Distribution(SD) and Human Resources (HR). There wereoriginally 150 users.
The second phase followed two years later toaccommodate the new industry solution, SAPR/3 IS-U. At the same time, Hera implementedSAP BW (with SEM in a second phase) onSun hardware with the Solaris operating systemplatform in a single instance database environ-ment. To be specific, it used a large Sun com-puter with 3 Domains as a kind of ‘system in asystem’. The resulting increase in SAP use alsodrove up user numbers significantly.
“It was a stable system that essentially did whatwe wanted. However, the architecture did haveone Achilles’ heel – if a node failed (activepassive cluster configuration), we could notprotect the continuity of the SAP applicationsrunning on it. It was something we simplycould not and would not accept,” recalledHera IT manager Fabrizio Grisoni.
Hera approached the problem by examiningvarious ways to ensure high availability. In theend, they picked a solution based on OracleReal Application Clusters. As Grisoni explained,“No other technology in this class comparesto Oracle RAC in terms of high availability,performance enhancement, scalability andflexibility.”
Successful Oracle RAC Implementation
and Tests
The overhaul with Oracle RAC started in thespring of 2006, when Hera Holding beganmeticulously planning the future system en-vironment in close cooperation with Oracle’sGlobal Technology Center for SAP in Walldorf(Germany) and the Sun support team. Thiswas followed by a rapid installation, the setupof the new environment and rigorous testing.
The project team built an Oracle RAC archi-tecture (Oracle 9.2.0.7) with 2 database in-stances on 2 SunFire 25K hardware systems(two node clusters; Sun Cluster 3.1 with SunQFS and Solaris 9). Each of these two connectednodes holds 3 separate “application Domains”,each with their own Sun domain and Oracledatabase: one SAP IS-U system (Release 4.6C,IS-U 4.64) and one SAP BW system (3.1).The SAP application servers were “outsourced”to Sun Blade 8000 AMD Opteron hardware,while a new storage architecture was imple-mented alongside a new SAN system (HitachiHDS 9990).
The O2O (Oracle-To-Oracle) TransitionServices Set was used to migrate the 7 TBdatabase to the new RAC system. Thanksmainly to O2O, the migration was completedin only 36 hours. Others keys tool in theproject, on the same Go live, where the “fullreorganization” of the DB on the target SAN,IS-U logical partitioning with Oracle DBPhysical Partitioning for specific Billing andInvoicing Table. It split up IS-U tables andimproved database access and performanceduring periods of high IS-U use.
“We’re well equipped for
further corporate growth
because our current IT
architecture and applications
perfectly meet a wide
variety of requirements.
And Oracle RAC is one of
the key elements in this mix.”
– Fabrizio Grisoni, Systems andArchitecture Manager, Famula@on-line S.p.A., Gruppo Hera
Oracle RAC for SAP at Gruppo Hera32
According to Hera System & Architecturemanager Grisoni, “The new Oracle RAC en-vironment was implemented without any realdifficulties. The comprehensive post-imple-mentation tests were also extremely successful.”The tests ran through every imaginable scenario– from the sudden shut-down of a cluster nodeor database instance through to a hard diskcrash or network failure.
Considerable Benefits
“The implementation of Oracle RAC has reallypaid off for Hera,” said Managing DirectorFasoli and Architecture Manager Grisoni. Theyadded, “In our business, it’s very importantfor our mission-critical applications to runsmoothly. With Oracle Real ApplicationClusters, we have the assurance we need thatthese software systems will remain highlyavailable. If one node or database instance issuddenly no longer available – for any reasonat all – the other nodes take over. And the usershardly notice that there was a system problemin the first place.”
Oracle’s database clustering technology enablesHera to achieve major increases in productivityand efficiency. For example, the utility companyhas boosted its processing/invoicing performancesignificantly. “Pre-RAC, we were generating45.000 billing document x hour. “After the
partitioning we’ve doubled that amount, andwith the AMD Opteron Application Server wecan generating more than 250.000 documentx hour” noted a satisfied Grisoni.
With Oracle RAC, Hera has even more roomto maneuver in terms of system scalability.The new environment already handles itsapprox. 1.500 users effortlessly on line. Andit can be easily expanded if necessary – suchas after the new strategical acquisition of theGroup. Hera simply has to add other applica-tion server in front of the RAC Domain envi-ronment.
Hera is already planning to switch over toOracle RAC 10g in the near future. It alsointends to deploy Oracle Dataguard in orderto strengthen its existing disaster recoverymechanisms even more.
“No other technology in
this class compares to
Oracle RAC in terms of high
availability, performance
enhancement, scalability
and flexibility.”
– Piera Fasoli,Managing Director, and
– Fabrizio Grisoni,Systems and ArchitectureManager, Famula@on-line S.p.A., Gruppo Hera
1533Oracle 10g RAC for SAP at Stadtwerke Munich
Major release upgrade and database
migration
The Stadtwerke Munich (SWM), the city ofMunich’s public utility company, is the largestmunicipal enterprise in Germany with around6800 employees and a group revenue of over€4.2 billion (2006). From the private individ-ual or medium-sized company through to theglobal player, SWM is a partner to all sizes ofcustomer, supplying them with energy, waterand associated services reliably and cost-effec-tively. In addition to energy supplies and ser-vices, the company’s spectrum encompasses thecomplete energy and water value-added chain.SWM is also a municipal service provider offer-ing high service quality and enhancing leisureopportunities in the world-famous city on theIsar with its indoor and outdoor swimmingpools. And with the comprehensive mobilityservices provided by MVG (subway, bus andstreetcar), SWM helps the citizens of Munichto travel in a way that is kind to the city andthe environment. Stadtwerke Munich’s servicesto citizens and customers are available roundthe clock – 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
This “all-round service” simply would notwork without a sophisticated, well-functioningIT system. SAP systems play a key role in thisrespect, to the extent that Stadtwerke Munichdescribes them as “critical to success”. Thecompany uses SAP ERP (ECC 6.0), includingthe IS-U/CCS solution designed specificallyfor the utility industry, for management ofcustomer and vendor data, billing, procurementhandling, maintenance management, and muchmore besides. SWM has a total of around 4500)users. Since the end of the mainframe era thepreferred medium for SAP use has been theMicrosoft Windows platform in conjunctionwith an Oracle database, though open-sourceplatforms such as Linux have figured in theconsiderations for some time now. And theextent of SAP use has been – and still is – con-tinuously increasing. The SAP database vol-ume is growing by around 100 gigabytes permonth, and currently totals around 4 terabytes.In addition to SAP, SWM has well over 100other applications, most of which operatetogether on Oracle. Extensive experience hasalready been gathered with Oracle9i RAC forSAP and a large number of improvementshave been introduced.
“Running an Oracle RAC migration was the logical thing to do when upgrading SAP ERP.
The improvements we achieved in terms of costs, availability, performance and scalability
were obvious even with Oracle9i RAC for SAP. Oracle 10g RAC for SAP is allowing us to
yet further optimize corporate applications that run on Microsoft Windows.”
— R U D O L F B A Y E R L
Systems Operations Manager, Information and
Process Technology Division, SWM Services GmbH
Stadtwerke Munich
Services GmbH
Industry:
Utility/Public Sector
Annual Revenue:
€4.2 billion
Employees:
Around 6,800
Oracle Products & Services:
• Oracle Database 10g
Release 2
• Oracle 10g RAC for SAP
Clusters (RAC)
• Oracle OCFS
• Oracle Support
Key Benefits
• Opportunities for cost
efficiency optimization
• Greater stability
• Enhanced scaling
possibilities
• Enhanced performance
• Greater protection of
investment
• Efficient database manage-
ment
• Sophisticated system
monitoring
Im
M U N I C H P U B L I C S E R V I C E S : O R A C L E 1 0 g R A C
F O R S A P O P T I M I Z E S A P P L I C A T I O N S
T H A T R U N O N M I C R O S O F T W I N D O W S
10D A T A B A S E
g
34
Move to Oracle 10g RAC for SAP:
A logical step
“One of the aims of the SAP ERP upgrade wasto reorient our SAP database with Oracle 10gRelease 2. Given the very positive experiencewe accumulated with Oracle9i RAC for SAP,it was also a logical step to implement anOracle RAC upgrade alongside the SAP majorrelease upgrade and the database migration.In doing so we wanted to stay with the Micro-soft Windows OS platform,” explains RudolfBayerl, System Operations Manager in theInformation and Process Technology Division of SWM Services GmbH.
In choosing Oracle RAC 10g, SWM – an SAPcustomer for many years – combined invest-ment protection for its hardware, system stabi-lity, enhanced performance and extra scope forhigh scalability. The company also wanted toexploit a range of extended functions providedby Oracle 10g RAC for SAP, such as AWR(Automatic Workload Repository) tools fordatabase diagnostics and system managementfor the entire database environment.
“As was the case with the implementation ofOracle9i RAC for SAP, prior to deployingOracle 10g RAC for SAP we talked to Oracle,Microsoft, SAP, EMC and the new hardwarevendor Fujitsu Siemens Computers,” saysManfred Fischer, Systems Engineer/OCP atSWM Services GmbH. The RAC upgrade wasimplemented as a pilot project.
Because the company was using new, morepowerful hardware (a blade server), it was pos-sible to use a 2-node cluster instead of a 3-nodecluster. FlexFrame 3.2B was chosen for central anddialog instances and an RAC configuration forthe database. The plan was initially to run Oracle 10g RACfor SAP together with R/3, and then later withSAP ERP or ECC 6.0. Oracle 10g RAC for SAPtogether with SAP ERP were scheduled to gointo productive operation in early November2007.
Oracle RAC installation took just one day
Beginning in the spring, the individual pro-ject phases were implemented one at a time.Throughout the process the Global OracleTechnology Center in Walldorf (Germany)served as preferred contact partner for theOracle RAC team at SWM. SWM opted toset up the Oracle RAC for SAP environmentafresh.
After the system was set up, hardware andnetwork tests were carried out and the newOracle RAC system was installed, includingthe new Oracle RAC Clusterware running onthe 10g database version. “This stage tookonly a day to complete and went off without ahitch,” says Fischer. Once this stage was com-plete Oracle 10g RAC for SAP was extensivelytested. Particular attention was focused onfunction tests and the services of the cluster.
When this work was successfully completedthe next step was to transfer the data to thenew database environment. The whole processtook around 10 hours to complete as the data-base and the Oracle RAC environment wereset up afresh. This was followed by furthersystem tests (performance tests, OCFS tests,fail-over tests and others) with Oracle 10gRAC for SAP, in conjunction with SAP R/3.“These functionality tests for the completeenvironment passed off exactly as we hoped,”says Fischer. nization to
10D A T A B A S E
g
35Oracle 10g RAC for SAP at Stadtwerke Munich
As he points out, the AWR tools, for example,allow the user to perform very in-depth analy-ses – including root cause analyses – with justa few clicks. “This is a tremendous asset. In apotential error situation, or if we were experi-encing performance problems, we can respondimmediately and we know instantly wherewe need to act. We can also draw on seamlessdocumentation of all our performance data,for whatever purpose we need it.”
SWM’s SAP team are also impressed by thenew features of the SAP database Oracle 10gon Windows: “Database reorganizations, inparticular, are much more efficient with thenew 10g functions. This alone makes ourworkload considerably easier and thereforeimproves productivity.”
Oracle RAC for SAP migration a logical move
In July 2007 the productive system wasmigrated to 10g Release 2 RAC, still opera-ting on SAP 4.6C.
This was followed in early November by themove to the new SAP ERP system, which hasbeen in productive operation with the Oracle10.2 database and Oracle 10g Real Applica-tion Clusters for SAP ever since. “It was onlylogical to implement an Oracle RAC migra-tion together with the SAP ERP upgrade.Even with Oracle9i RAC for SAP, the improve-ments in terms of costs, availability, perfor-mance and scalability were clear to see. WithOracle 10g RAC for SAP we’ve managed tooptimize the use of business applications onMicrosoft Windows even further,” sums upMr. Bayerl, the System Operations Manager.
The new functions provided by Oracle 10gRAC for SAP ”make us more efficient andenable us to perform complex diagnostics oranalyses more quickly and easily. As a resultwe are in a position to respond more specifi-cally and appropriately to potential changesin the system,” says Fischer.
36
Cat Logistics went production with SAP® Service and Asset Management in November 2007.
The database server is running AIX 5.3 and the database is Oracle 10g with Real Application
Clusters. The Oracle Cluster spans approximately ten miles utilizing a high-speed dark fiber
connection between the nodes of the RAC cluster. This configuration ensures the high
availability of Cat Logistics SAP applications. The Oracle Global Technology Center and
Oracle Development team in Walldorf Germany in addition to the local Oracle account team
provided key support during the implementation of Oracle RAC.
C a t L o g i s t i c s R U N S O R A C L E 1 0 g
R E A L A P P L I C A T I O N C L U S T E R S
CAT LOGISTICS SERVICES
Taking Service Parts Management to the
Next Generation with SAP® Software
Summary
When Morton, Ill.–based Caterpillar LogisticsServices, Inc. (Cat Logistics) wanted to moveits aftermarket parts operation to a next-gene-ration platform, it joined forces with FordMotor Company and SAP to develop a power-ful service parts management application.Now part of the SAP® Service and AssetManagement solution, the software is helpingthe company stay on the cutting edge.
Key Challenges
• Provide continued support for increasinglysophisticated global operations
• Eliminate costly legacy systems• Meet customer expectations for next-genera-
tion technology
Project Objectives
• Move away from in-house software develop-ment
• Provide the functionality and power tomanage complex service parts supply chains
• Implement Web-enabled, standard techno-logy
Key Benefits
• 25% to 50% improvement in warehouseproductivity
• 5% to 10% improvement in fill rates• 15% to 25% reduction in inventory• 20% to 30% reduction in IT support costs• More time for IT staff to spend on customer
service and integration
Solutions and Services
SAP Service and Asset Management
Existing Environment
• Legacy systems• SAP software for supply chain management
and SAP industry specific automotive solu-tions (functionality now found in themySAP™ ERP application)
Current Environment
Database: OracleHardware: IBMOperating System: IBM AIX
Why SAP Solution?
Long-term stability of SAP as a company – aswell as its industry and supply chain know-ledge and global perspective and support
Cat Logistics
Configuration Details:
SAP Application
SAP Versions: ECC 6.0, SCM 5.0, CRM5.0, NW2004s, BI 7.0, EP 6.0, XI
Hardware & Operating System:
IBM pSeries/AIX 5.3
SAP servers: Initial setup – 8 (4-way)pSeries hosting 14 SAP app serverinstances, handles up to 4,000 SAPS.End state – 100+ 4-way pSeries handle170,000 SAPS
Users: Initial setup – 200 named users,40 concurrent users. End state – 3500named users and 20,000 customer users
Transactions: Initial setup – 600K dialogsteps per day * User and Transactionmetrics estimated
Oracle Database
Database: Oracle RAC 10.2.0.2
Hardware & Operation System: IBMpSeries / AIX 5.3
Stretch cluster: 10 miles (Gb ethernetover single mode fiber < 1ms latency)
File System: IBM GPFS 2.3 with GPFSReplication
DB Size: Single DB Totals
Current: 10 Gigabytes to 200 Gigabytes,growing to 1.2Terabytes
End State: 250 Gigabytes to 3 Terabytes,growing to 15 to 20 Terabytes
Disk: 60% greater than size of db
CPU: 4 to 6 depending on SAP compo-nent (AIX virtualization)
Memory: 3 – 8 Gb depending on SAPcomponent
The following article "SAP – Cat LogisticsSuccess Story” is a reprint from CatLogistics Industry Article, with permissionfrom Cat Logistics. The original article canbe viewed at:http://logistics.cat.com/cda/components/fullArticle?m=115228&x=7&id=394024
Oracle 10g RAC for SAP at Cat Logist ics 37
C a t L o g i s t i c s
Caterpillar Logistics Services, Inc.’s expertiseis in providing truly integrated logistics solu-tions, says Krish Srinivasan, manager of strat-egy and business development at the Morton,Ill.–based company. “We draw on the intellec-tual property developed in serving Caterpillar,our parent company, which has more 80 yearsof supply chain experience and one of theworld’s largest and most efficient logisticsoperations,” he says. And a few years ago,with an eye on rapidly evolving informationtechnology, the company wanted to rethinkthe systems that were helping it deliver thatexpertise to customers. “We decided that weshould take a look at our technology strategygoing forward – especially in our service partsbusiness,” says Srinivasan.
Commonly known as Cat Logistics, the com-pany was formed in 1987 as a wholly ownedsubsidiary of Caterpillar Inc. – the world’sleading manufacturer of construction andmining equipment, diesel and natural gasengines, and industrial gas turbines. TodayCat Logistics provides integrated logisticssolutions global companies in a variety ofindustries. It operates more than 105 officesand facilities in 25 countries on six continentsand serves more than 60 client companies,including Caterpillar itself.
The aftermarket parts business is key for CatLogistics, which manages some 25 millionSKUs annually. To support those vital operati-ons, the company had been using legacysystems that it developed and fine-tuned overthe course of several decades to support itssophisticated, and often complex, supplychain processes.
“Some of our legacy systems were 10 to 15years old, and they were getting expensive tomaintain,” explains Srinivasan. In addition, thecompany had created variety of customizedversions of service parts management softwareto meet the needs of various customers, whichalso drove up maintenance costs.
“To keep upgrading and enhancing thosesystems was not an option,” says Srinivasan.“It was becoming too time-consuming anddifficult.” Instead, Cat Logistics began sear-ching for a packaged service parts manage-ment application. “We took an exhaustivelook at the solutions that existed in the mar-ket and found that were woefully limited interms of capabilities, especially compared tothe rich functionality of the systems CatLogistics had developed over the years,” saysSrinivasan. “We could see that buying thesoftware in the marketplace would be a stepbackward for us.”
Collaborating on a Solution
To keep its critical service parts businessmoving forward, Cat Logistics decided to createexactly what it wanted. The company joinedforces with Ford Motor Company, which wasalso interested in a better service parts mana-gement solution, and the two began lookingfor a development partner. Soon, they decidedwork with SAP to develop an end-to-end,next-generation service parts managementapplication – an effort that would eventuallyproduce a key portion of the Service and AssetManagement solution.
Cat Logistics decided to work with SAP inpart because of SAP’s stability as a companyand in part because of the software vendor’sunderstanding of supply chain management –and service parts management in particular.“Service parts is one of the core key strengthsof our business,” says Scott Koval, marketingdirector at Cat Logistics. “We could not ent-rust this effort to a company that might notbe around five years down the road. We wan-ted to go with a vendor that the business, thathad been around for some time, and that wasgoing to be around for the long term.”
Cat Logistics was also looking for a partnerthat, like Cat Logistics itself, was focused onthe future. “We wanted a company thatunderstood where the technology was going,”Srinivasan says. Just as important, CatLogistics felt that SAP was committed tokeeping its software on the leading edge.
“SAP brought a genuine
desire to make sure the
software not only met
the needs of Cat Logistics,
but was also a best-in-
class solution for the
industry as whole.”
– Kevin Nelson,Development Manager,Caterpillar LogisticsServices, Inc.
"With global available-to-
promise functionality,
for example, we can do a
complete network search
for parts, across ware-
houses. That makes it
possible to service
customer orders more
quickly and avoid going
back to suppliers to order
additional inventory you
don’t need.”
– Scott Koval,Marketing Director,Caterpillar LogisticsServices, Inc.
38
“In a fast-changing business,” Srinivasan says,“we wanted a partner that was prepared toapply ongoing research and development tothe product and market needs changed.”
Cat Logistics, Ford, and SAP brought a widerange of complementary knowledge and expe-rience to the effort. “Two heads are better thanone, and, in this case, three were better thantwo,” says Srinivasan. “This development effortbenefited greatly from the combined expertiseof these three companies.”
SAP contributed both technology and busin-ess knowledge gained through extensive expe-rience in the supply chain management arenain a variety of industries. “Among otherthings,” says Srinivasan, “SAP understood theneeds of various market sectors and the chal-lenges of a global business – the cross-borderissues, import/export regulations, local taxlaws, and so forth. It was prepared to developa solution that could work for many differentregions of the globe.”
The three companies worked closely togetherunder a well-defined governance structure thatspelled out details about roles, responsibilities,and timing in a highly collaborative process.“At the team level, people were meeting atleast once a week and more often two or threetimes a week,” says Kevin Nelson, develop-ment manager at Cat Logistics. “Throughoutthe process,” he adds, “SAP brought a genuinedesire to make sure the software not only metthe needs of Cat Logistics, but was also a best-in-class solution for the industry as a whole.”
Support for the Complex Aftermarket Supply
Chain
The result of these efforts was a powerful ser-vice parts management application that givesCat Logistics fully integrated order manage-ment, materials management, and warehousemanagement capabilities. The SAP softwareprovides the full range of tools and functionsthe company needs to support its sophistica-ted operations, from planning to fulfillmentand analysis, with real-time execution of logi-stics processes, including exception monito-ring and alerts.
The SAP software supports a number of pro-cesses that are integral to both Cat Logisticsand its customers. "With global available-topromise functionality, for example, we can doa complete network search for parts, acrosswarehouses,” says Koval. “That makes it pos-sible to service customers more quickly andavoid going back to suppliers to order addi-tional inventory you don’t need.”
The software also provides improved supportfor large, complex operations. “It lets us ma-nage situations where, for example, you haveorders coming in from tens of thousands ofcustomers into a complex warehouse environ-ment, with orders going to different destina-tions and potentially being cross-docked orconsolidated after they leave the facility,” saysNelson. “The intelligence in the routing systemis very effective.”
At the same time, the company’s service partsmanagement operations now run on a moreflexible, Web-enabled platform that makes iteasy to bring customers onboard and supportthem virtually anywhere in the world. “And,”says Srinivasan, “we now have multilanguageand multicurrency capabilities that we can usewith global customers. These things will helpus reach out to customers in different regions.”
The Payoff for Cat Logistics – and its
Customers
In the near future, Cat Logistics plans to rollthe SAP Service and Asset Management solu-tion out to a growing number of customers,with some 20,000 users expected to be on thesystem within three years. Currently, the com-pany is implementing the software for one ofits most sophisticated clients – its parentcompany, Caterpillar. “Caterpillar has placed astrategic emphasis on its aftermarket supplychain; it recognizes that significant repeat salesof its prime products happens because of theaftermarket support it provides for those pro-ducts,” says Srinivasan. “For example,” he ex-plains, “the company has a ‘no-orphan policy’of supporting products as long as customersown them – which can be decades – and the
"SAP understood the
needs of various market
sectors and the chal-
lenges of global business
– the cross-border issues,
import/export regula-
tions, local tax laws, and
so forth. It was prepared
to develop a solution that
could work for many
different regions of the
globe.”
– Krish Srinivasan,Manager of Strategy andBusiness Development,Caterpillar LogisticsServices, Inc.
Oracle 10g RAC for SAP at Cat Logist ics 39
aftermarket supply chain achieves same-dayshipping of parts 99.7% of the time.”
Already experience shows that Cat Logistics’customers are likely to see clear benefits fromthe SAP software. As an example, in facilitieswhere the company has used the software’swarehouse management capabilities, produc-tivity in terms of lines shipped has improvedanywhere from 25% to 50%. “With the inte-grated solution supporting the service partssupply chain,” says Srinivasan, “we will alsosee significant benefits in inventory manage-ment, with an expected 5% to 10% improve-ment in fill rates and inventory reductions of15% to 25%, depending on the customer’sindustry.”
Meanwhile the use of standard software and areduced need for in-house development shouldlower IT support costs 20% to 30% – andallow Cat Logistics’ in-house IT professionalsto focus on customer service and integration,rather than ongoing software development.
Overall the SAP Service and Asset
Management solution gives Cat Logistics thetools it needs to work effectively with itscustomers and help them streamline theiraftermarket supply chains. Just as important,the software provides a technology platformthat can keep up with an expanding andrapidly changing business. “Our customerslike having the confidence of knowing theirsupply chains are supported by the latest stan-dard technology,” says Srinivasan. “This is asystem that we and our customers can growwith in the coming years.”
40
Swiss retailer Coop has improved its SAP
system stability thanks to Oracle Partitioning.
The company is now in a position to respond
quickly and effectively to any negative
impacts on SAP system stability.
The Coop Group has one overriding objective- to become Switzerland’s number one retailer.And the company is certainly on the right trackto achieving its goal, even despite ongoingchanges in the industry and evolving customerbehavior. The retail giant’s sales have risencontinuously in recent years, reaching around15.5 billion Swiss francs (CHF) in 2006. Theworkforce has also grown to more than 45,800while the number of stores has mushroomed toalmost 1550. Coop is also involved in a numberof cooperations at international level.
Making sure the huge range of goods and pro-ducts arrives in stores or markets at the righttime and in the right quantity requires a sophi-sticated logistics system. But it also depends onpowerful and well-functioning IT. That's whereCoop’s SAP corporate solutions combined withthe Oracle database come in. The retail groupcompleted the move to SAP ERP and Oracle10g last year. There are also several SAP BWsystems running on Oracle. The number ofSAP users is around the 4500 mark, and thesize of the Oracle database is currently about8 TB. The hardware platform is Sun (Solaris)while the disk subsystems are from Hitachi.
Oracle: Strategic system partner
Manuel Honegger, Head of IT Developmentat Coop, explains: “We made a conscious stra-tegic decision in favor of Oracle.” The high-profile company also relies on Oracle AdvancedCustomer Service for SAP, utilizing a range ofmade-to-measure support services.
But that’s not all. As an SAP user Coop decidedto use Oracle Partitioning – and for very goodreasons. “There's no question that the SAP-Oracle combination works brilliantly. But whenyou need to process very large volumes of datawith SAP, the SAP table design quickly reachesits limits. If you don’t implement optimizati-ons, you put system stability at risk. This canresult in business processes no longer beingcorrectly supported by corporate solutions, or insome cases not supported at all. Oracle Partitio-ning is an effective lever for enhancing or achie-ving the long-term system stability of mission-critical SAP applications,” says Honegger.
Coop handles enormous volumes of data.Movement data alone accounts for a massive10 TB. Every week the enterprise moves andprocesses five million order items. These areorders for local stores being transferred toheadquarters and processed there in order todispatch goods deliveries. For these processesCoop needs maximum system performanceand availability from its SAP systems. If anydifficulties arise during this stage, businesscontinuity is put at risk.
“Oracle Partitioning is an effective lever for enhancing the long-term system stability of
mission-critical SAP applications. It's associated with higher performance, optimizations
in database reorganization, and savings in hardware resources."
– M A N U E L H O N E G G E R ,
Head of Development, Member of the Management,
Coop Switzerland
R E T A I L E R C O O P I S B E N E F I T I N G F R O M O R A C L E
P A R T I T I O N I N G
Industry:
Commerce/Retail
Turnover:
Over 15,5 billion CHF 2006
Workforce:
Around 45,800
Oracle products & services:
• Oracle Database 10g
• Oracle Partitioning
• Oracle Advanced Customer
Service (ACS) for SAP
41
Oracle Partitioning: The winning card
It was when two key problem areas were identi-fied that Coop’s IT team decided to act toimprove system stability. The first problemwas reduced performance and the second wasthat data volumes were growing at an above-average rate, particularly movement data.These problems were analyzed from differentperspectives.
A conclusion was soon reached: “We were ableto show that an optimized data archiving con-cept using Oracle Partitioning would enableus to improve the situation. Most importantly,with Oracle Partitioning you can partitiondisproportionately large tables. This allowed usto efficiently split and archive logical structuresin different physical segments, which had apositive impact on SAP system stability,”explains Honegger.
In concrete terms the analyses revealed that anumber of tablespaces were five times biggerthan was normal. Some were growing to avolume of 800 GB, with a few even amoun-ting to 1000 GB.
Oracle database specialists at the Oracle for SAPSolution Center in Walldorf worked with Coopto develop a concept for implementing OraclePartitioning with maximum efficiency. In a firststep the team identified which tables were goodcandidates for partitioning. The partitioningcriteria were then defined for each table. It wasimportant that integration into the SAP systemwas as seamless as possible to ensure optimumfunctioning and keep administration as simpleas possible. This is achieved by linking thepartitioning criterion with the SAP numberrange table NRIV. This strategy ensures thatboth SAP archiving and the performance-criticalSQL statements are optimally supported. Finally, tests were carried out to check theeffectiveness of the various measures. “The resultwas exactly what we hoped for. Put simply,after implementing Oracle Partitioning thesystem wasn’t big and heavy any more. Oraclealso helped us significantly increase our SAPsystem performance,” says Honegger.
Other focus of optimization
Having achieved all these improvements,which resulted in optimized data archiving,it was time to make further use of OraclePartitioning. But this time the focus wasdifferent. The aim was now to increaseresource capacities, and in particular to leverageOracle Partitioning in such a way as to takethe strain off the disk subsystems to the tuneof around 2 TB. In this project, both tablesand indices were optimized with the aid ofOracle Partitioning with the specific aim ofcutting down on resources. This too was achie-ved in a team effort between Coop’s IT depart-ment and the Oracle database specialists. At theend of the day the 2 TB reduction was achievedthanks to more efficient means of databasereorganization – all through the use of OraclePartitioning.
Honegger sums up: “It was Oracle Partitioningthat enabled us to enhance our system stabilityin the face of substantial growth in data volu-mes and therefore avoid potential downtimes.As an SAP user handling large volumes of datawe benefited from Oracle Partitioning inseveral ways. SAP supported and verified ourapproach.”
As part of an ongoing optimization process forsystem stability there are plans to use OraclePartitioning as a kind of proactive early-war-ning mechanism. Should system stability beimpaired, for any reason, Oracle Partitioningwill be employed to nip the problem in the bud.
“We made a conscious
strategic decision in favor
of Oracle.”
– Manuel Honegger,Head of Development,Member of the Manage-ment, Coop Switzerland.
COOP is benef it ing from Oracle Part i t ioning for SAP
42
Colgate Palmolive Company
The Colgate-Palmolive Company is a world-wide producer of consumer products thatsupply some of the world’s leading brands inoral care, personal care, household and fabriccare and pet food. It operates in more than200 countries and generated $11.4 billionin revenue in 2005. Colgate-Palmolive hasachieved dramatic growth in revenue andearnings in the past decade through rapiddevelopment and introduction of innovativenew products that meet emerging consumerpreferences.
A key factor in Colgate’s ability to sustainsuch rapid business growth has been itscommitment to continuous performanceimprovement. Colgate has established keyperformance indicators (KPI) globally anduses these to link forces driving its businessto daily operating activities throughout theorganization. For example, how do salesprojections compare to actuals? Are customersreceiving rebates as promised? Profitabilityanalysis measures the efficiency of specificbrands and marketing programs. The cor-porate-wide data warehouse, based on SAP’sBusiness Information Warehouse (BW) pro-duct, is used to report on a broad range ofcorporate performance. BW provides a unifiedreporting and analysis infrastructure thatintegrates sales and distribution information,
inventory and process managements, andfinancial and personnel data. Divisional mana-gers, corporate staff, subsidiaries and partnersfor supply chain optimization and businessintelligence use BW to keep their finger onthe pulse of the business and look for impro-vement opportunities.
In 2002, Colgate consolidated multiple datawarehouses into a single warehouse to imple-ment this unified corporate-wide reportingand analysis capability. Today, the SAP BWinstallation is based on Oracle9i Release 2running on a 20-processor IBM p595 “Squa-dron” with 64GB of main memory and 10Terabytes of IBM storage under AIX 5.2.The Oracle database contains 4.7 TB of rawdata and has a total size of 8.7 TB. It incorpo-rates data from many different sources includingSAP R/3, and financial, sales, and manufactu-ring operational systems.
BW provides a multidimensional capabilitythrough snowflake schemas called InfoCubes.Colgate’s data warehouse contains 400InfoCubes ranging in size from one millionto 370 million rows. It also contains over5341 pre-computed aggregates. InfoCube and aggregate data is stored in more than1,800,000 table partitions in the databaseresulting in one of the most complex databasestructures used worldwide.
“Data warehouses have not only grown to be very large in many enterprises:
their growth is accelerating. A data warehouse occupying a terabyte of disk- a rarity
a few years ago– is now quite common. And many enterprises are now planning or
implementing data warehouses occupying ten terabytes of disk or more".
WinterCorp http://wintercorp.com
by Richard Winter and Rick Burns, April 2007
F I E L D E X P E R I E N C E W I T H L A R G E - S C A L E
D A T A W A R E H O U S I N G O N O R A C L E
Large-Scale Data Warehousing on Oracle at Colgate Palmol ive 43
One table contains over eight thousand parti-tions. Overall the BW database contains 69,600tables containing over 25 billion rows, and540,000 attributes.
The aggregated data allows business managersto quickly discover performance metrics suchas daily sales flash, inventory levels and accountperformance. Complex ad hoc queries, invol-ving joins of up to 30 tables, comprise 80%-90% of the system workload. The BW systemservices 10,000 users worldwide, about aquarter of Colgate-Palmolive’s employees, andhandles 16,000 navigational steps on a typicalday.
The size of Colgate’s BW system presentedColgate’s IT staff with multiple scalabilitychallenges. These challenges revolved aroundthe large number of database partitions andsegments in the warehouse and the extensiveuse of drop and create operations on partitio-ned objects, according to Deighton Weekes,a Colgate Technical Executive. Colgate under-took a performance analysis and tuning exer-cise, helped by collaboration from its systemvendors, which quickly resulted in an overallperformance improvement for the consolidatedBW system of 80%. According to Mr. Weekes,the use of Oracle locally managed tablespaceand parallel query features, as well as the auto-matic space management and PGA memorymanagement features introduced in Oracle9i,were key factors in achieving this performancegain.
Additional performance challenges relate tothe rapidly increasing number of users and theresulting utilization levels. Colgate is in theprocess of upgrading to Oracle 10g and isevaluating RAC for additional parallelism. These technology upgrades are expected todeliver additional performance enhancements,including more dynamic management ofpartitioning and effective partition elimination,critical to meeting the escalating utilizationdemands. Colgate has found Oracle to be fast,scalable, robust and easy to administer. It is akey component of Colgate’s IT infrastructure.
45
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 A T I O N S
F O R W I N D O W S A N D L I N U X
We have separate scenarios for Windows and Linux, see also SAP Note 527843
Oracle RAC 10.2 on Windows x86, x86_64 and IA64
• Only Oracle 10.2.0.2, no 10.2.0.3
• OCFS 10.2.0.2 or higher for database, Oracle software and SAP software
• Windows 2003 Release 2, Windows 2003 SP1 or SP2
• SAP Enqueue Replication covered by Microsoft Cluster Services(SAP Central Instance can be co-located with RAC instance)
• iSCSI only supported up to 4 nodes
Not supported:
– crossover cables for interconnect (only Gigabit Ethernet,minimum two cards)
– Infiniband – ASM – raw devices
Oracle RAC 10.2 on Linux x86, x86_64, IA64 and Power
for RHEL4, RHEL5, SLES9 and SLES10
• Only Oracle 10.2.0.2, no 10.2.0.3
• OCFS2 1.2.3 or higher for database, Oracle software and SAP software
• EMC Celerra NFS for database, Oracle software and SAP software
• NetAppliance NFS for database, Oracle software and SAP software
• SAP Enqueue Replication covered by Oracle Clusterware (2 nodeconfiguration, co-location of SAP Central Instance with RAC Instance)
• SAP Enqueue Replication covered by HP ServiceGuard or Red HatCluster (minimum 4 nodes are required, SAP central instance cannotbe co-located with RAC instance on same node)
Not supported:
– iSCSI – Firewire – crossover cables for interconnect (only GigabitEthernet, minimum two cards) – Infiniband – Red Hat GFS
– Veritas CFS, ASM, raw devices
Windows Linux
Certi f ied SAP on RAC Configurat ions for Windows and Linux
46 DELL-SAP on RAC Promotion
Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC)option for SAP supports the transparentdeployment of a single database across acluster of hardware servers, providing faulttolerance from hardware failures or plannedoutages.
Utilizing RAC with Dell hardware for yourSAP environment provides the final compo-nent for scalability at every layer in thesolution stack.
Now you have available to you, from Dellspecial promotional pricing of Oracle techno-logy for SAP customers on Dell.
What is the Promotional Offering?
• Oracle Database infrastructure exclusivelyfor SAP application customers
• Targeted to small and medium sizedimplementations for Microsoft® Windows®
/Linux customers, sold via Dell channel
• Sold as packaged new systems.
• Available World Wide
Products Included:
• Oracle 10g Database Enterprise Edition
• Partitioning
• Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC)
For more information about this specialOracle for SAP pricing from Dell, contactyour Dell sales representative.
DELL
1 Dell Way, Round Rock, TX 78682-2222or eMail to: [email protected]
Dell offers a fully scalable solution for your SAP deployment to help simplify operations,
improve utilization and achieve cost-effective scaling. The goal is to meet today’s SAP
needs while preparing the company for the growth and accompanying needs of the future.
O R A C L E 1 0 g R E A L A P P L I C A T I O N C L U S T E R S
F O R S A P P R O M O T I O N A L O F F E R I N G F R O M D E L L
48
O R A C L E A D V A N C E D C U S T O M E R S E R V I C E S F O R S A P
Oracle Database and SAP
More than two thirds of all SAP customersentrust their data to the Oracle database.Almost two million registered users at nearlyten thousand locations have come to expectthe best technology and performance that theOracle database brings to the SAP environ-ment. Its outstanding attributes are a directresult of multiple years of intensive partner-ship between SAP and Oracle.
The SAP and Oracle cooperation does not endwith the database technology integration.Customer support and satisfaction are tangibleday-to-day benefits of this partnership. A keyenabler of this level of customer support is SAP’srequirement for permanent on-site Oracle Sup-port staff. This group staffs the DevelopmentLevel Support queue and provides immediateassistance for a wide range of problems fromsemi-critical to critical priority 1 “productiondown” issues.
The SAP Support and Services group at Oraclewas created to coordinate and staff this focusedcustomer support team. We are a worldwideservices group providing assistance in allaspects of SAP operation. Specifically ourmandate covers tasks ranging from manage-ment of increasing data volumes, performanceoptimization, setup of high availability solu-tions, to data exchange between the SAPsystem and other Oracle Databases over asecure interface.
Oracle’s offering of SAP-specific services focuson Oracle database expertise as it applies to yourSAP environment. Our services include data-base centric core technology services as describedabove, database and platform migrations, inte-gration services, and a workshop program forin-depth technical customer training.
Oracle Services in concert with SAP leveragesover fourteen years of experience in deliveringR/3 solutions founded on the Oracle Database.
This area of service is fully integrated in Oracle’sAdvanced Customer Service (ACS) model. Inaddition to Standard Product Support, ACSoffers specific service packages tailored tocustomers needs. ACS provides three separateand distinct packages for your individualizedOracle/SAP support. Those three are:
• Assisted Service
• Business Critical Assistance
• Solution Support Center
Assisted Services
Assisted Services are support advisory servicesfor customers who need customized assistancefrom Oracle’s SAP engineers. The concept isto provide Oracle engineers that are skilledwith the SAP application system, tools, proce-dures and most importantly the Oracle data-base with SAP.
An Oracle engineer is assigned to the customerfor a predetermined period of time to deliveragreed upon support services for the efficientoperation and management of Oracle softwarefor SAP on Oracle.
These support services are geared to optimizefuture support processes. Representative servicesare listed below:
• Database Design and operations
• Oracle Software configuration for SAP
• Performance Analysis
• High Availability /Backup Concepts
• Oracle RAC enablement for SAP
• Migration Service for SAP R/3
• Oracle to Oracle Migrations (O2O)
• Oracle Workshops for SAP
• Technical Assessments
• Implementation of Partitioning in astandard SAP ERP system
10D A T A B A S E
g
Oracle Advanced Customer Services for SAP 49
Database Design and configuration of an
SAP R/3 System
In the beginning of an R/3 project the appli-cation design and implementation is the focusof most activities. It is this time that is mostcritical for ensuring that the configuration anddesign of your database is configured optimallyand flexible enough for meeting your futureneeds. Improper or suboptimal configurationmeans increased effort in terms of operationalefficiency and management. We thereforeadvise you to engage the proper resourcesduring the initial stage of your R/3 project tohelp you prepare and configure the databasewith current best practices and your designgoals in mind.
Of course, we also specialize in optimizing andimproving existing database designs.
Performance Analysis
Performance is one of the keys to success inthe introduction and operation of an SAPsystem for all SAP customers. Our speciallytrained staff not only know the Oracle Data-base in detail but are also trained extremelywell in the SAP environment. Therefore, ourstaff is in a position to analyze any performanceproblem and to provide solutions.
These solutions could be, for example, in theareas of index design, parameter optimization,ABAP optimization or adaptation of operatingsystem parameters. Our staff is also of courseable to deal with specific features of individualSAP solutions. Performance problems in SAPR/3-BW systems appear in various forms andtherefore the approaches to solution-solvingwill vary.
High Availability /Backup Concepts
Unavailability of the SAP system leads to mas-sive problems for most customers (logisticallyand financially). In order to prevent this, everySAP customer should deal with the subject“high availability.” In particular customers whodescribe their system as mission critical mustlook thoroughly at this subject. However, inthis area there are very different approaches,
all with advantages and disadvantages (hard-ware clusters, mirror technologies, standbydatabases, RAC, data guard...). We can adviseyou on the right strategy for your companyand of course help during implementation ofthe chosen solution.
Oracle RAC enablement for SAP
Oracle provides the ‘Real Application Clusters’(RAC) option. You can use this option todistribute the database instance on differentservers (nodes). This offers new possibilitiesin the area of high availability of an Oracledatabase system, and also provides greaterflexibility in the dimensioning of systemresources (scalability). Oracle provides profes-sional service to assist you with enablingRAC your SAP environments. These servicesinclude workshops, planning, and implemen-tation of RAC software.
Migration Services for SAP R/3
A great majority of all SAP R/3 installationsrun on an Oracle database. The Oracle SAPSupport and Services group is certified bySAP for R/3 database migrations and can per-form migrations for companies who wish tomigrate their SAP R/3 installation from anon-Oracle Database to Oracle. Professionalservice can be provided for migrations of anySAP database. Many customer systems havealready been successfully migrated by theOracle SAP Support and Services group. Weoffer you the best migration service you canget, because we have the experience needed tohandle any problems that may arise from thedatabase administrator’s perspective. TheOracle SAP Support and Services group canalso offer customers introductory training inusing the new database.
Oracle to Oracle Migrations (O2O) –
Extremely fast and smooth Database
Migrations for SAP Systems, Heterogeneous
Database Migrations
SAP offers the R3LOAD program for databasemigrations. This program has been availablefor quite some time, but unfortunately, has
50
just one disadvantage: It is very slow becauseinitially, the entire source system must beunloaded. The entire contents of the databaseare then stored temporarily in the file systemin the form of flat files, so that it can be reloa-ded to the target system in a second step. Thetransfer speeds achievable with this process arearound 500GB in 24 hours, depending on thehardware available and the tuning measuresconducted. If you are dependent on this proce-dure, then for larger systems (> 1TB) down-times of significantly more than 48 hours mustalready be planned for. In other words: A wee-kend is not long enough. In order to offer ourOracle customers a significantly faster process,we have developed together with HewlettPackard a service set that can support a transferspeed of more than 100 to 150GB per hour.This means systems can now be migrated thatcould not be handled previously. The serviceset is based on Oracle technologies, which aredeployed consistently to the migration at hand.It supports migrations of SAP R/3 as well asBW systems. After the migration is concluded,the systems migrated using our process are fullysupported by SAP.
Oracle Partitioning for SAP customers
Oracle Partitioning is an option to Oracle Data-base 10g Enterprise Edition. At a technicallevel, Oracle Partitioning allows tables andindexes within a database to be subdividedinto smaller pieces. Oracle can ‘partition’ atable by ranges of values, so for example thedata for Jan 1, 2008 through Jan 31, 2008 is inits own partition. Oracle can also partition atable by a list of values, so that North Americandata is in one partition, while the Europeandata is in another partition. Partitioning is acritical feature for managing large databases.Growth is the basic challenge that partitioningaddresses for large databases, and Oracle Parti-tioning enables a “divide and conquer” techniquefor managing the large tables in the database,especially as those tables grow. Although yourdatabase may have twice as much data next yearas it does today, your end-users are not going
to tolerate their application running twice asslow, your database is not going to be giventwice as much time to complete maintenanceand batch processing, and your IT managersare not going to double your hardware bud-get. Partitioning is the feature that allows adatabase to scale for very large datasets whilemaintaining consistent performance, withoutan unduly increased need for hardware resour-ces or administrative efforts.Oracle Partitioning is embedded tightly intothe core database engine and supported byOracle’s administrative tools. From an SAPapplication perspective, partitioning is com-pletely transparent: no changes need to bemade to the application or to the SQL state-ments in order to use partitioning.Oracle Services and Support for SAP is happyto demonstrate for you the benefits of Parti-tioning. Partitioning for SAP is supportedsince SAP Version 4.6C SAP Kernel 6.20 Pleasecontact us for more information and see furthermore the Success Story for Partitioning atCoop Switzerland in this edition.
Oracle Workshop 10g for SAP R/3
Customers – Oracle 10g and SAP
The Oracle Version 10g Release 2 has beenavailable to SAP customers since mid 2006.This release offers significant extensions, aswell as new features in the operation of anSAP system in various respects. The focus ofthis workshop is to make known the aspectsof Oracle 10g, which are necessary for SAPcustomers to be familiar with and knowledge-able about in order to, have an effect on dailytheir work.
Within four days of workshops additionaldocumentation will be provided.
In the following you will find an extract fromthe subject areas, which will be discussedduring the workshop:
• New background processes• Automatic SGA Management• Tablespaces management• Segment shrinking
10D A T A B A S E
g
51
• Enhancements for Automatic PGA tuning• Cost Based Optimizer with 10g and SAP• Creation of Optimizer Statistics – Changes/
Enhancements
• SAP Oracle parameter recommendations• Extensions to Online Table Reorganizations
(LONG to LOB)• Incremental RMAN backups• Undo Management – enhancements• Flashback• Resumable space enhancements in 10g• Extensions regarding Recovery• Automatic Workload Repository /Active
Session history / Automatic DatabaseDiagnostic Monitor
• Oracle’s wait interface – enhancementswith 10g
Get to know the fascinating possibilities ofOracle 10g in the SAP environment.
Business Critical Assistance
This service includes all areas covered byTechnical Assessment, as well as furthercritical areas such as:
- Specialized training- Emergency support- Global analysis of the system- 24/7 availability (on arrangement)
Solution Support Center
This is the highest possible level within theAdvanced Customer Service architecture. Thislevel includes all other levels and the SupportCenter also offers the following additionalservices:
- Dedicated telephone number (24/7)for response to Severity 1 issues
- Focused team of support engineerswho may be reached directly via thededicated number
- Detailed analyses of the system- Specific system monitoring (not offered
as standard component any longer)- Mission critical support- Production Assessments
- Oracle product Patch Assessments- Applied research- Knowledge transfer workshops- Emergency Support
The benefits of the ACS concept result inregular customer care by a focused team.This way there is a close relationship with thecustomer and the customer’s systems. In thesame way, the ACS concept focuses particularlyon proactive services with the aim of notallowing problems to appear, or if necessary,to react as effectively as possible.
We hope we have aroused your interest in ourservice. We would be glad to give you contact data for our customers upon request.For further information please contact inEMEA:
and in Americas [email protected]
Oracle Advanced Customer Services for SAP
52
Summary
Mentor Graphics has relied on Hyperion solu-tions since 1998, when they first choseHyperion Essbase® for global sales reporting.In the years that followed, the company hasaggressively added to their solution withEssbase applications for executive reporting in2001, budgeting and planning in 2002 andtheir most recent addition in 2005—apowerful system for managing worldwidehuman resources. Today there are more than300 users, and the company has a clear visionto make information even more broadlyavailable in the coming years.
About Mentor Graphics
Mentor Graphics Corporation is a world leaderin electronic hardware and software designsolutions, providing products, consultingservices and award-winning support for theworld’s most successful electronics and semi-conductor companies. Established in 1981,the about $700 million company employsapproximately 3,950 people worldwide.
Managing the most important asset
A fast-moving technology leader, MentorGraphics firmly believes that people are itsgreatest asset.With employees across 28engineering sites and a global distributionchannel with 48 offices around the world, the staffing for both the finance and human re-source (HR) departments. As with its otherdata-intensive requirements, Mentor Graphicsturned to Hyperion to quickly meet theneeds of both.
The company’s finance department is primarilyconcerned with accurate headcount numbers.Since most of the company’s divisions andbusiness units have employees all over theworld, it is particularly important for manage-ment to have a reliable tool to determine howmany people work for each group at any giventime.
“One of the biggest benefits of our Hyperion business performance management system is
having information available in near real time. We no longer need to spend hours or days
answering executive managers’ questions. We now literally have information at our finger-
tips and we can immediately provide the answers they need to make informed decisions.”
– J A N - W I L L E M B E L D M A N ,
team lead for analytical applications and
data quality at Mentor Graphics
M E N T O R G R A P H I C S – H Y P E R I O N H E L P S
T E C H N O L O G Y L E A D E R M A N A G E F I N A N C I A L D A T A
A N D I T S M O S T I M P O R T A N T A S S E T S – P E O P L EElectronic design automation
Mentor Graphics 53
When it comes to hiring, the finance organi-zation has discovered over the years that head-count assumptions are notoriously optimistic.To ensure accurate data, they need to trackactual hires versus planned hires, and be ableto deeply analyze each separately.
In addition to the finance department’s require-ments, the HR department needs a simple toolto understand attrition rates, reasons for leavingthe company, hiring trends, and other criticalHR statistics. They also need to be able to viewand analyze information in a variety of ways—by geography, division or specialty—so theycan address sophisticated queries like “did welose any key technologists this year?” or “howmany sales people do we have in Europe?” Tobest understand, analyze and act upon globalstaffing needs, Mentor Graphics implementeda Hyperion Essbase multidimensional cube.With Hyperion Essbase, almost immediately,the HR department realized the ability to makebetter HR allocation decisions. Some teams, forexample, operate more as service organizations,with fluctuations occurring as project needs in-crease and decrease. Essbase allows these groupsto address the need to have 20 people work forthree months on one project and then work foranother group on a completely different project.
“By making more informed staffing decisions,we are growing top line revenue by allocatingpeople where the need is greatest, and managingthe bottom line by making sure they are beingdeployed optimally at all times,” says Jan-Wil-lem Beldman, team lead for analytical applica-tions and data quality at Mentor Graphics.
“One of the biggest benefits of our HR systemis our ability to answer questions in near realtime,” says Beldman. “We no longer need tospend hours or days answering very specific HRquestions posed by executive managers. Oncevery hard and time consuming—with a processthat involved multiple spreadsheets acrossdepartments, geographies and cost centers—wenow literally have this information at our finger-tips and we can immediately provide the ans-wers they need to make informed decisions.”
A constant source of accurate information
Mentor Graphics counts on Hyperion Essbaseto provide executives with rich, informativeand customized reports that make company-wide information easy to see and act upon.Refreshed up to six times a day, the system isa constant source of accurate information thatexecutives can trust, including detailed datalike critical bookings and revenue performance-to-plan analyses. The company has increasedthe sophistication of this system over the years,bringing together SQL dimension builds,partitioning and MaxL scripting to ensureconstant accuracy while completely elimina-ting the need for ongoing maintenance.
“Because the worldwide reporting system isintegrated with our sales, marketing, HR andfinance applications, our executives have theability to drill-down into report data foradditional information and perform powerfulad hoc analysis,” says Beldman.“They valuehaving the ability to not just see data, but tolearn more about the genesis of numbers asneeded.”
Transforming the budgeting and planning
process
One of the most dramatic transformations thatMentor Graphics has undertaken has been theworldwide budgeting and planning process.After its initial success with the Hyperion-based sales reporting system, in 2002 theybegan an effort to replace the time-consumingplanning and budgeting process—an annualevent involving more than 1,200 spreadsheetsfor each worldwide cost center—with a bot-tom-up,Web-based solution using Essbase.“We used to go through an exhaustive processfor budgeting and planning,” recalls Beldman.“Every group had to tie out their budget, andwhen it all came together, it never quite mat-ched. There were broken formulas, inaccuratenumbers, version control issues, and a lot ofback-and-forth to find where the errors hap-pened and correct them before they proliferatedthroughout the process.”
“Eight years ago, we had
limited access to data.
Today, with Hyperion,
we have analytic power,
worldwide access to
information, true scala-
bility and unbreakable
processes. We make bet-
ter, faster business deci-
sions that directly benefit
the bottom line and keep
us competitive.”
– Jan-Willem Beldman,team lead for analytical applications and dataquality at MentorGraphics
54
Today, Mentor Graphics plans quarterly insteadof annually, using a bottom-up planning pro-cess that ensures that data is accurately collectedas each person moves through the process. Withan automated workflow for each cost center,plans are approved hierarchically—first bydivision, then by region and finally by thecompany controller. By the time the planningprocess is complete, there is a comprehensivemodel in place that includes details for eachcost center and rolls all the way up to the top.
“It only took 2.5 people and 4 months to imple-ment the planning system,” says Beldman, “asmall price to pay for a highly automated ap-proach that ensures timely, accurate budgetsand reports. It also provides us with the abilityto do ‘what-if ’ scenarios and other sophistica-ted modeling and analysis.”
Ensuring data consistency and version control
Hyperion Master Data Management (MDM)is integrated with each of Mentor Graphics’Essbase applications, allowing them to managehierarchical master data across these applicati-ons, as well as their transactional, reportingand analytics systems.
Implementing Hyperion MDM has allowedMentor Graphics to streamline its changemanagement process for updating its multiplesystems’ master data in unison. After the ini-tial roll-out in sales hierarchy management, thecompany expanded the technology to its costcenter, statutory and management reporting,budgeting and forecasting product hierarchies.
“Today, we use Hyperion MDM as the centralserver to publish master data across heteroge-neous systems from our multidimensionaldatabase, SAP, Callidus and Oracle systems,”Beldman explains. “Hyperion MDM has enab-led us to achieve consistency of our data andimprove version control of various enterprisehierarchies.” constantly improving access to information Hyperion Essbase and Hyperion MDMprovide timely information, speed of analysisand accuracy of data management that a geo-graphically dispersed company like MentorGraphics needs to remain competitive. To con-tinue to improve the availability of informa-tion across the company, Mentor Graphics iscurrently exploring the use of dashboards as away to bring timely, actionable data directlyto the desktop.
“We have seen incredible results,” says Beld-man. “Eight years ago, we had limited accessto data. Today we have analytic power, world-wide access to information, true scalability andunbreakable processes. Moreover, we havecompletely transformed the way we think aboutdata.We are no longer dealing with a collectionof abstract numbers, but we’re building intel-ligence around every single aspect of our busi-ness.We make better, faster business decisionsthat directly benefit the bottom line and keepus competitive.”
For further information please contact:
Jens Kaminski, Senior Technical Manager
Tuesday March 25, 2008
Oracle Database with Oracle Real ApplicationClusters on IBM System p 570 with POWER6Processors Demonstrates Superior Scalabilityand Performance.
REDWOOD SHORES, Calif., March 25/PRNewswire-FirstCall/ – Oracle today anno-unced a new world-record result on the SAP®Sales and Distribution- Parallel (SD-Parallel)Standard Application Benchmark running onthe SAP ERP 6.0 application.(1) With theseresults, Oracle Database with Oracle RealApplication Clusters continues to demonstrateexceptional grid computing capabilities, deli-vering superior performance, scalability, andvalue.
Running IBM AIX 5L(TM) 5.3 on a 5-nodeIBM System p(TM) 570 Server cluster, eachwith 8 dual-core 4.7 GHz POWER6 proces-sors, Oracle Database with Oracle RealApplication Clusters achieved 37,040 SAPSD-Parallel Benchmark users, outperformingthe previous world record of 36,000 SD-Parallel Benchmark users, held by Oracle onthe same platform configuration. (2) Thisworld record is the highest ever measuredresult on the SAP SD-Parallel StandardApplication Benchmark based on the numberof SAP SD-Parallel Benchmark users.
In addition, Oracle and IBM also deliveredexcellent two, three, and four- node results onthe IBM System p(TM) 570 Server cluster,demonstrating the exceptional scalability ofOracle Database with Oracle Real ApplicationClusters running on highly scalable SMP ser-vers.(3) When measured from two, three, fourand five-node configurations, as documentedand certified by SAP, Oracle Database withOracle Real Application Clusters shows an
impressive 93 percent scalability,achieving 15,520, 22,416, 30,016and 37,040 SAP SD- ParallelBenchmark users, respectively,while providing a high level ofperformance and availability.
“These benchmark results are vividproof that Oracle Real ApplicationClusters delivers unique capabilitiesand outstanding value to customers. The stel-lar SAP benchmark result clearly demonstratesthat Oracle Real Application Clusters providesnear linear scalability as nodes are added to thecluster, even for highly advanced applicationssuch as those from SAP,” said Juan Loaiza,senior vice president, Systems Technology,Oracle. “Further, Oracle Real ApplicationClusters provides availability benefits thatcannot be achieved in single SMP environ-ments. The combination of linear scalability,and high availability on leading platformssuch as the IBM System p(TM) 570 Servercluster provides an outstanding platform fordeployments of SAP solutions.”
About SAP Standard Application Benchmarks
SAP Standard Application Benchmarks weredeveloped by SAP AG to provide comparativeload analysis of SAP solutions. These results,as of March 25, 2008, have been certified bySAP AG. The SAP certification number for thelatest results was not available at press timeand can be found at the following Web page:http://www.sap.com/benchmark.
About Oracle
Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL – News) is the world'slargest enterprise software company. For moreinformation about Oracle, visit our Web siteat http://www.oracle.com.
O R A C L E A C H I E V E S W O R L D R E C O R D R E S U L T
O N T H E S A P® S D - P A R A L L E L S T A N D A R D
A P P L I C A T I O N B E N C H M A R K
SAP Standard Appl icat ion Benchmarks 55
SAP Standard Appl icat ion Benchmarks56
Trademarks
Oracle is a registered trademark of OracleCorporation and/or its affiliates. SAP and otherSAP products and services mentioned herein aswell as their respective logos are trademarks orregistered trademarks of SAP AG in Germanyand in several other countries all over the world.Other names may be trademarks of their res-pective owners.
1– The SAP SD-Parallel Standard ApplicationBenchmark performed on November 26, 2007by IBM in Beaverton, OR, USA has been certi-fied with the following data: 37,040 SAP SD-Parallel Benchmark users, 1.86 seconds averagedialog response time, 3,749,000 fully processedorder line items per hour, 11,247,000 dialogsteps per hour, 187,450 SAPS. Server confi-guration: IBM System p 570, 8 processors/16cores/32 threads, POWER6, 4.7 GHz, 128 KBL1 cache and 4 MB L2 cache per core, 32 MBL3 cache per processor, 128 GM main memory,running AIX 5L version 5.3, Oracle 10g RealApplication Clusters and SAP ERP 6.0. TheSAP certification number was not available atpress time and can be found athttp://www.sap.com/benchmark.
2 – The SAP SD-Parallel Standard ApplicationBenchmark performed on November 6, 2007by IBM in Beaverton, OR, USA has been cer-tified with the following data: 36,000 SAP SD-Parallel Benchmark users, 1.76 seconds averagedialog response time, 3,673,670 fully processedorder line items per hour, 11,021,000 dialogsteps per hour, 183,680 SAPS.Server configuration: IBM System p 570, 8processors/16 cores/32 threads, POWER6, 4.7GHz, 128 KB L1 cache and 4 MB L2 cache percore, 32 MB L3 cache per processor, 128 GMmain memory, running AIX 5L version 5.3,Oracle 10g Real Application Clusters and SAPERP 6.0. Certification number: 2007066(http://www.sap.com/solutions/benchmark/
pdf/Cert6607.pdf)
3– The SAP certification number for the follo-wing 2, 3 and 4-node results was not availableat press time and can be found athttp://www.sap.com/benchmark.
Four-node Results – The SAP SD-ParallelStandard Application Benchmark performedon November 14, 2007 by IBM in Beaverton,OR, USA has been certified with the followingdata: 30,016 SAP SD-Parallel Benchmark users,1.86 seconds average dialog response time,3,036,000 fully processed order line items perhour, 9,018,000 dialog steps per hour,1151,800 SAPS. Server configuration: IBMSystem p 570, 8 processors/16 cores/32 threads,POWER6, 4.7 GHz, 128 KB L1 cache and4 MB L2 cache per core, 32 MB L3 cache perprocessor, 128 GM main memory, runningAIX 5L version 5.3, Oracle 10g Real Appli-cation Clusters and SAP ERP 6.0.
Three-node Results – The SAP SD-ParallelStandard Application Benchmark performedon November 16, 2007 by IBM in Beaverton,OR, USA has been certified with the followingdata: 22,416 SAP SD-Parallel Benchmark users,1.94 seconds average dialog response time,2,252,330 fully processed order line itemsper hour, 6,757,000 dialog steps per hour,112,620 SAPS. Server configuration: IBMSystem p 570, 8 processors/16 cores/32threads, POWER6, 4.7 GHz, 128 KB L1 cacheand 4 MB L2 cache per core, 32 MB L3 cacheper processor, 128 GM main memory, runningAIX 5L version 5.3, Oracle 10g Real Appli-cation Clusters and SAP ERP 6.0.
Two-node Results – The SAP SD-ParallelStandard Application Benchmark performedon November 16, 2007 by IBM in Beaverton,OR, USA has been certified with the followingdata: 15,520 SAP SD-Parallel Benchmark users,1.94 seconds average dialog response time,1,559,330 fully processed order line items perhour, 4,678,000 dialog steps per hour, 77,970SAPS. Server configuration: IBM System p570, 8 processors/16 cores/32 threads,POWER6, 4.7 GHz, 128 KB L1 cache and4 MB L2 cache per core, 32 MB L3 cache perprocessor, 128 GM main memory, runningAIX 5L version 5.3, Oracle 10g Real Appli-cation Clusters and SAP ERP 6.0.
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S W A R O V S K I I N C R E A S E S S A P S Y S T E M
A V A I L A B I L I T Y W I T H O R A C L E D A T A G U A R D
“The functionality of Oracle Data Guard gives us security and also the peace of mind of knowing
that if a fault arises, we can carry on working with SAP within a defined period of time.”
– H A R A L D N E U N E R
IT IS Data Center Manager at Swarovski
When it comes to safeguarding SAP ERP
applications, Swarovski, the world’s leading
manufacturer of cut crystals, opts for
Oracle Data Guard. By so doing the com-
pany is increasing its SAP DBMS availabil-
ity and is also in a position to respond
quickly to potential faults. In this interview,
Swarovski’s IT IS Data Center Manager
Harald Neuner tells us more about the
implementation of Oracle Data Guard.
Was there a particular reason why Swarovski
decided to address the issue of stability and
DBMS high availability?
Neuner: Any company that uses SAP needs tolook at the issue of stability. At the end of theday, non-availability of an ERP system putsbusiness continuity at risk. Initially weimplemented binary mirroring of our Oracledatabase with disk subsystems. But when afault actually arose we realized that this meas-ure wasn’t enough. It didn’t offer adequateprotection. This was the main reason why weopted to switch from mirroring to a standbydatabase concept.
What does ‘protection’ or a protection
mechanism mean to you?
Neuner: We realized that physically backingup a binary DBMS mirror wasn’t enough forour needs. The sticking point was the exis-tence of logical errors. Almost every business
that uses SAP utilizes the scope for expansion-with the powerful SAP development tools.This involves the latent risk of data beingdeleted or accidentally changed throughhuman error. With Oracle Data Guard we canemploy an effective protection mechanism,because all transactions in the primary data-base are automatically and correctly trans-ferred to the standby database after a delayof 4 hours. This time delay is a compromisebetween the logs created within a definedtime and their integration into a secondarysystem, and the physical conversion process.
Why did you opt for Oracle Data Guard?
Neuner: We had, and we continue to have, avery good experience of the Oracle database inthe SAP environment. So Oracle Data Guardwas simply the logical choice.
How did you go about implementing Oracle
Data Guard?
Neuner: The team at the Oracle for SAPTechnology Center in Walldorf (Germany)helped us with the implementation of OracleData Guard. Together we defined a projectschedule and then implemented the core tasksone step at a time. The key to it all was theconfiguration of Oracle Data Guard.Everything worked extremely well. We’vealways found that drawing on the expertise ofOracle specialists is well worth it. Above all,it enabled us to build up valuable databaseexpertise in-house. We are now in a positionto install Data Guard ourselves.
Austrian Automotive
Motorcycle and Touring Club
HQ in Vienna
www.oeamtc.at
5959Oracle Data Guard for SAP customer Swarovski
Were there any noteworthy incidents during
the implementation phase?
Neuner: Everything worked very well indeed.
What is your experience of Oracle Data Guard
in practice? What benefits has it brought?
Neuner: Oracle Data Guard increased the SAPDBMS high availability. The functionality ofData Guard gives us security and also thepeace of mind of knowing that if a fault arises,we can carry on working with SAP within adefined period of time. With Oracle DataGuard we can switch easily to other DB serversand know that it works. We also carry outannual practice drills for the worst-case sce-nario. And, knock on wood, we’ve never hadoccasion to actually switch to a different host.
Do you have any further plans in terms of
Oracle Data Guard?
Neuner: After the positive experience we’vehad with Oracle Data Guard, which we’reusing for our ERP systems, we’re endeavoringto support more SAP systems with this solu-tion. We are also about to take a decision as tothe next stage in system stability, and OracleRAC is the front runner.
In 1895, Bohemian immigrant and visionary businessman Daniel Swarovski I took up residence in the Tyrolean village of Wattens (Austria) with hisnewest invention, a revolutionary machine for the mechanical grinding of crystal gems. This innovation, which would later captivate the internationalfashion scene, made Swarovski the world’s leading manufacturer of precision-cut crystals. Today, these crystals can be found in the fashion and jewelryindustry and in the world of lighting, architecture and interior design. The global company, which still has its headquarters in Wattens in the Tyrol andis now managed by the 4th and 5th generations of the family, does business in over 120 countries. In 2006, with a total of 20,000 employees, Swarovskigenerated a turnover of €2.37 billion. Swarovski manufactures and markets crystal components under two brand names, CRYSTALLIZED™ –Swarovski Elements for fashion and design and STRASS® Swarovski® Crystal for architecture and lighting. While Swarovski crystals have become anindispensable part of the creations of international designers, the Swarovski jewelry and home decor collections are marketed in all the world’s majorcities through more than 1150 of the company’s own stores and through authorized dealers. One example is the Daniel Swarovski Collection, thecompany’s couture line and flagship collection, which faithfully reflects the ideas and visions of the company founder. The Swarovski Crystal Societycurrently has almost 400,000 members, enthusiastic collectors of the popular crystal figures, and the Swarovski Crystal Worlds in Wattens haveattracted over 7 million visitors since their opening in 1995. In the Chambers of Wonder at the Crystal Worlds, Swarovski celebrates the mystique ofcrystals and presents a fascinating, sparkling dream world that in the space of just a few years has become one of Austria’s most popular visitordestinations. The company also owns four independent entities: Tyrolit® manufactures grinding tools, Swareflex makes reflector systems for road traffic,Swarovski Optik produces high-precision optical equipment, and Signity is Swarovski’s brand for unique gemstones.
Illuminating Fashion and Culture, Home and Leisure www.swarovski.com
Oracle: Strategic SAP database
Swarovski has been working with SAP R/3
since 1995. Previously, the world-famous
company based in Wattens, Austria, relied
on SAP R/2. About two and a half years ago
the company switched to Oracle on Unix,
abandoning the Windows operating system
for its database systems. In Wattens the
company operates two physically separate
data centers. SAP is used as the central
system to which all branch offices and
subsidiaries have access. Worldwide, an
average of around 2000 users work with
mission-critical ERP applications at
Swarovski. Oracle (as yet 9i) is used as the
strategic SAP database.
60
I O U G S A P S P E C I A L I N T E R E S T G R O U P ( S A P S I G )
Join us at Collaborate 2008
in Denver Colorado, April 13 – 17.
The Independent Oracle User Group (IOUG) sponsors Special Interest Groups (SIGs) thatare designed to assist members with specificOracle products and products that are tightlyintegrated with the Oracle products they use.The goal of the IOUG SIGs is to offer technicalinformation and peer-to-peer collaboration inorder to facilitate the effective implementationof products.
The SAP SIG provides a forum for open discus-sion and education on Oracle technology rela-ted issues associated with SAP running on anOracle database.
During the 1998 IOUG conference a groupof about 40 attendees started as a roundtableto surface issues and solutions to commonproblems. The group has grown every year sinceand officially became an IOUG SIG in 1999.
IOUG SAP SIG Mission
The mission of the SAP SIG is to provide aforum for open discussion, education and net-working to meet the challenges of implemen-ting, and maintaining Oracle databases withSAP Applications. The SAP SIG facilitatesraising issues and providing enhancement sug-gestions to both SAP AG and Oracle develop-ment teams.
The benefits of SAP SIG membership inclu-de; Offering open forums for discussion andnetworking opportunities among members,education sessions at Collaborate, periodicconference calls and web conferences with guestspeakers covering a range of technical topics.
SAP SIG Events
The main events for the SAP SIG are held atthe yearly Collaborate Conference. Each yearthere is a business meeting, networkingreception, SAP/Oracle Development Updatewith representatives from both SAP and Oracleincluding Q&A. Also lunch time meetingsoffer informal discussions and formal technicalsessions on various SAP/Oracle issues.
The SAP SIG also sponsors quarterly techno-logy forums. The forums are one hour dial-incalls or Web Casts, each forum focuses on aspecific topic of interest to the SIG. This is agreat opportunity to stay in touch with theOracle and SAP technical communities.
Web Site
The SAP SIG web site can be accessed fromthe IOUG web site at: http://www.ioug.org/Click the Special Interest Groups Tab, thenfollowed 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 yourIOUG 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 LiaisonOracle [email protected]
IOU
GIOUG – SAP Special Interest Group (SAP SIG)
ODM Connector 2.1 for SAP BI Customers 61
The Oracle Data Mining (ODM) Connector enables users of SAP Business Warehouse 3.5
and SAP NetWeaverTM Business Intelligence 7.0 to mine their SAP data using Oracle 10g
Data Mining within the SAP Data Mining framework. This SAP-certified solution gives users
the powerful and scalable Oracle 10g Data Mining in-database algorithms along with the
Oracle Data Mining graphical interface to extend and complement the SAP analytics offering.
O R A C L E 1 0 g D A T A M I N I N G C O N N E C T O R 2 . 1
F O R S A P N E T W E A V E R ™ B U S I N E S S I N T E L L I G E N C E
ODM Connector 2.1
With the integration of Oracle 10g DataMining and SAP BW 3.5 / NetWeaver BI 7.0,the ODM Connector provides SAP customerswith advanced analytics, embedded in OracleDatabase 10g. Data and business analystsbenefit from the wide range of state-of-the-artdata mining functionality, present in Oracle10g Data Mining to solve a wide variety ofbusiness problems.
Oracle has certified its data mining serverwith the official BW-DMI 3.5 interface ofSAP AG through the ODM Connector. Inte-gration saves SAP users time and money toleverage Oracle’s in-database mining capabili-ties.
The ODM Connector 2.1 allows customersto make their SAP BW data available to thepowerful Oracle 10g Data Mining and OracleData Miner (ODMr) graphical interface andintegrates results with the SAP BW data.
Because Oracle 10g Data Mining is embeddedin Oracle Database, mining results can beaccessed through other Oracle tools, includingSiebel Answers, OLAP, and BI Publisher.Using Oracle 10g Data Mining, SAP customerslower their total cost of ownership (TCO) fordata mining, including analysis, development and deployment, while being integrated withtheir SAP environment.
Mining in the database provides SAP customerswith increased data security, as data do notneed to leave the Oracle Database environment.Moreover, in-database mining is scalable usingOracle’s Real Application Clusters (RAC),allowing more of the data to be mined. g10
D A T A B A S E
62
SAP BW Analysis Process Designer
Oracle Data Miner
ODM Connector 2.1 for SAP BI customers 63
Technical Specification
Data Preparation and Analysis
• BW- and ODMr-provided analysis andmanual transformations.
• ODMr-provided Automated data prepara-tions as part of model build, test, and apply(scoring).
In-Database Mining
• All model build and apply operations occur within the Oracle 10g Database.
• Default settings for all Oracle 10g datamining operations. Ability to override andspecify settings.
Attribute Importance
• Identify attributes as important for predictinga target attribute using Minimum DescriptionLength algorithm.
Classification
• Predict binary or multi-class outcomes withsupporting probability and assess model qualityusing Confusion matrix, Lift, Receiver OperatorCharacteristics.
• Decision Tree Algorithm – a popular algorithmfor providing human interpretable rules with fastscoring.
• Support Vector Machine (SVM) Algorithm – astate-of-the-art algorithm recognized as superiorto neural networks. Excellent for wide and sparsedata.
• Naïve Bayes Algorithm – makes predictionsusing Bayes’ Theorem, which derives the pro-bability of a prediction from the underlyingevidence, as observed in the data.
• Adaptive Bayes Networks Algorithm –builds models based on counts observed fromdata, supporting three modes of operation:pruned Naïve Bayes, single-tree, or boostedmulti-tree. In the single-tree mode, ABNprovides model transparency with human inter-pretable rules.
Regression
• Predict continuous numerical outcomes withsupporting confidence and assess model qualityusing error statistics and scatter plots. Uses SVMalgorithm.
Association Rules
• A Priori Algorithm – find the occurrence andlikelihood of co-occurring events, e.g., Q, R,and S are associated with Z, 452 times, with78% confidence.
• Finds rules with support greater than a mini-mum support and confidence greater than aminimum confidence.
• Filtered rules retrieval
Clustering
• Enhanced k-Means Algorithm – this hierarchical,distance-based k-means algorithm partitions thedata into a predetermined number of clusters.
• Orthogonal Clustering (O-Cluster) Algorithm –creates a hierarchical, grid-based clustering model.O-Cluster supports both numerical and categoricalattributes. It is particularly good in high dimen-sional space.
Feature Extraction
• Non-Negative Matrix Factorization (NMF)Algorithm – a state-of-the-art algorithm thatgenerates new attributes using linear combinationsof the original attributes. Supports attributereduction and data understanding.
Anomaly Detection
• One-Class Support Vector Machine Algorithm– normally, classification requires knowledge of alltarget classes. A version of SVM, new in 10gRelease 2, can build a profile of one class andwhen applied, flag cases that are somehow diffe-rent from that profile (that is, “abnormal” or“suspicious”). This allows for the detection of rarecases that are not necessarily related to each other.
Platform Requirements
Oracle 10g R2 Data Mining runs in Oracle10g R2 Database on all supported platforms.SAP BW 3.5 SP05 including SAP J2EEApplication Server 6.40, or SAP NetWeaverBI 7.0 including SAP J2EE Application Server7.00 are required.
64 Delta Consult ing
Delta
For additional
information regarding
Delta Consulting,
please visit our website
at www.go-delta.com
or contact
Jack Tomb,
Partner at
610-558-1730.
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 strong
commitment to providing innovative and practical solutions that combine real-world
business expertise and products designed to extend and enhance the value and performance
of a customer’s SAP investment.
D E L T A C O N S U L T I N G
Our consulting services utilizes an extensivedatabase of senior consultants which averageover 9 years of SAP specific experience thatspans all SAP solutions and business servicesthat address the functional, technical andinfrastructure requirements of an SAP solution.In addition, through our extensive Partnernetwork we can provide worldwide deploymentcapabilities in the development area.
As a certified SAP Services Partner for over10 years and a member of the Oracle PreferredPartner Program (OPP), Delta Consulting ispleased to announce its selection by Oracleto extend its agreement to provide consultingservices for Oracle Real Application Clusters(RAC). Using SAP with Oracle RAC offers aunique solution for SAP customers, alreadyrunning Oracle by providing them with atotal solution that provides high availabilityand scalability. Our team includes highlyskilled and experienced Oracle DBA’s who aretrained and certified in SAP basis administra-tion.
Oracle 10g RAC is the highly scalable andreliable database cluster for mission criticalSAP solutions. Our commitment and focuson this technology enables Delta Consultingto bring the best practices for migrating anexisting SAP R/3 4.6D installation from asingle instance Oracle database to a multipleinstance Oracle RAC cluster database confi-guration.
Services to be provided by Delta Consultinginclude:
• RAC Implementations• Database Migrations• Tuning and Performance Optimization• System Healthchecks• Backup/Recovery and Hot Standby Solutions
Over two-thirds of SAP customers run theirapplications on Oracle. With SAP’s endorse-ment and certification of Oracle 10g RAC,the motivation to implement RAC include:
• Higher Availability– New Requirements– Maintenance window negotiation– More and more work places rely on
SAP R/3
• More Flexibility– Dynamical growth by adding servers– Better re-use of equipment
• Cost Savings– Buy cheaper servers (scale out)– Reduce maintenance costs
Realize Real ROI…the Rewards of Innovation.Let Delta Consulting provide your organizationwith the infrastructure services required topower your SAP environment.
Delta Consulting, Inc.5 Christy Drive, Suite 109 Chadds Ford, PA 19317eMail: [email protected].: 610-558-1730
65
E2SCorp
Everest Business Solutions
Inc.
459 Herndon Parkway
E2SCorp – Everest Business Solut ion, Inc
E 2 S C O R P ( E V E R E S T B U S I N E S S S O L U T I O N S , I N C )
B U S I N E S S P R O F I L E
E2SCorp delivers flexible and custom builtIT services and solutions to customers glo-bally. We constantly explore, develop andadapt new ways to do this. We understandthat one size most often does not fit all. Itis our constant endeavour to find the bestand most practical solutions to address ourcustomers’ unique business needs. Our ser-vices encompass a wide range of platformsand industry segments backed by a highlyskilled and experienced work force.
Our eminent customers include Fortune1000 companies like IBM, NorthropGrumman, Lockheed Martin, CACI,Verizon Wireless, Verizon Business, SprintNextel, NASD, Blue Cross Blue Shield,Siemens etc.
We are an Oracle Partner and Reseller andin the near future we hope to be an authori-zed SAP Technical services partner.
Our services include turnkey software deve-lopment, product development, consulting,testing, application maintenance and sup-port.
We offer onsite and offshore services as wellas a blend of both. Our flexible blendeddelivery models are tailored to meet our cli-ents’ requirements.
Our employees and consultants are profi-cient with Oracle/SAP applications and arebased in India and in the US. Our Oracleand SAP experience includes:
• Oracle iLearning• Oracle BI Discover• Oracle upgrade 9i to 10g• Database migrations from DB2, MS SQL
• Oracle Database Administration• Upgrade expertise with Oracle RAC (9i, 10g)• SAP Basis Administration• SAP Netweaver Administration• SAP R/3 administration with DB2, Oracle
9.2 & SAP DB 7.4• SAP Unicode migration experts• Oracle & SAP certified consultants• Oracle RAC subject matter experts
Our key software development centre is locatedat Herndon, Virginia.
We have global Offshore Development Centers(ODCs) at Bangalore and Hyderabad, in India.Our offshore infrastructure provides our custo-mers the benefits of:- Cost Savings- Secure premises - Secure connectivity- Restoration, replication & business continuity- Maximum utilization of the time zones- Dedicated Program/Project Managers,
Technical Lead Developers and QualityAssurance personnel
- System and Database Administrators- Resource availability to cover clients’ business
hours
For more information contact: Everest Business Solutions, Inc459 Herndon Parkway, Suite 10,Herndon, VA 20170Sowmiya J [email protected](O) + 1 703-673-7301(M) + 1 301-325-9407
UPW Innovative IT-Solut ions66
UPW
Innovative IT-Solutions
GmbH
Lilienthalstrasse 11,
D–64625 Bensheim
E-mail: [email protected]
http://www.upw.de
Tel. +49-6251 -5828-0
Fax: +49-6251 -5828-28
P O L I C Y G U A R D M A N A G E R – P G M F O R S A P,
O R A C L E A N D O P E R A T I N G S Y S T E M
UPW Innovative IT-Solutions –
secure solutions for professional business
The growing complexity of enterprise systemsand the increasing requirements of the govern-mental agencies for them are requesting intel-ligent security providing solutions.
A central monitoring and documentationsystem for regulatory demands accordinglyGOBS, SOX, EURO-SOX, J-SOX and 8th EUDirective is the insurance policy for CIOs andCFOs who are personal responsible by theseregulations.
PGM offers the fundament to reestablish atraceable and secure configuration of yourERP System on database, operating systemand application level.
The central repository permanently stores thestatus of your systems including all securityrelevant information. It also supports yourITIL processes like configuration and changemanagement. Different product environmentsare treated uniformly. PGM is the right solution for all responsiblemanagers who want to accomplish a considera-ble enhanced security.
The advantages of PGM are versatile for allmanagers effected by SOX and other legislatio-nal laws:
CIO
- Can enhanced the maturity level of theirchange and configuration management andcan benefit from an automated securityreporting
Chief Security Officer
- The security policies are documented,administrated and monitored in a centralsystem
Revisor Auditor
- Can compare present sytems with thesecurity policies.
Sourcing Partner and Retained Organisation
- All parties concerned with a sourcing projectcan define and verify the Security SLAs
Manager of Operation and Administrators
- Are relieved from permanent manual activitiesand can concentrate on more valuable tasks
UPW Innovative IT-Solutions Ltd was foundedin 1997. The idea behind: data always is the kernel ofany system. The symbiosis of operation system,database and application is the heartbeat of anycompany. Since our early days we are workingin the environment of high availibilty systems.Our customers are financial institutes, theGerman stock exchange, retailer and govern-mental organisations. As an Oracle partner wehave extensive Oracle knowhow. Our chiefengineer was more than 10 years responsiblefor security, planning and operating in anenterprise running SAP on Oracle database.
P E O P L E , K N O W L E D G E , P R O J E C T S , A N D I S 4 I T =
4 S U C C E S S F A C T O R S T O H E L P Y O U G E T A H E A D !
67IS4IT – IT Consult ing
IS4IT GmbH
Contact:
Michael JilgArea ManagerIS4IT GmbHGruenwalder Weg 28b82041 Oberhaching/GermanyTel: +49 89 638 98 48 22e-mail: [email protected]
The main task of IS4IT, as a manufacturer-independent IT-consulting firm, is solving ourclients’ technical problems through the appli-cation of our IT-specialists’ expertise.
We provide IT services individually-tailored toyour specific requirements. With the help ofaround 85 consultants across Germany, weprovide a full range of services, from analysis,conception, and planning, to final implemen-tation to the production process.
SAP Basis and SAP Infrastructure have success-fully been our main focus for many years.From the very beginning, our activities haveincluded solving problems of server- andstorage virtualization, as well as HA cluster.
In addition to handling such projects, we alsoprovide our customers with SAP technicalmaintenance in accordance with Service LevelAgreements.
68 TUSC – Oracle Partner for SAP
I N D U S T R Y L E A D E R C H O O S E S T U S C
R E M O T E D B A
IFF is a leading creator and manufacturer offlavors and fragrances used in a wide variety ofconsumer products – from fine fragrances andtoiletries, to soaps, detergents and other house-hold products, to beverages and food products. IFF is dedicated to The Pursuit of Excellence inevery area of its business, using knowledge, crea-tivity, innovation and technology to continuallyprovide customers with the highest qualityproducts and service and superior consumerunderstanding.
IFF has sales, manufacturing and creative facili-ties in 34 countries worldwide and annual salesexceeding $1.9 billion. In 2000, IFF acquiredBush Boake Allen, formerly the industry’s 7thbiggest player. To manage its Oracle systemsenvironment, IFF relies on TUSC Remote DBA.
“IFF has over 40 Oracle databases, includinga large ERP implementation,” stated MarshaDuvdevani, Manager, Database Administration.With systems in the United States, Australia,South Africa, India, Sweden, Turkey and Singa-pore, 24/7 monitoring, performance tuning andemergency support is essential.
The four-year partnership with TUSC beganwhen IFF acquired Bush Boake Allen, a for-mer competitor and TUSC client. Duvdevaniexplained, “One of our DBAs knew of TUSCand we needed additional Oracle expertise,so it made sense to add our databases to theTUSC contract. TUSC enabled a smoothtransition of incorporating support of the newlyacquired system and by mentoring our DBA.”
IFF has come to depend on Remote DBA andManaged Services, and benefits from TUSC’stechnical knowledge and expertise. “We benefitfrom our TUSC DBA’s experience with count-less other systems,” Duvdevani said. Througha web portal, which includes system reportsand documentation on all work performed, “Weknow that our systems are being maintained,”Duvdevani continued, “The expertise and depthof TUSC allows us to focus on strategic pro-jects, not system maintenance, knowledge gapsand turnover.”
“The expertise and depth of TUSC allows us to focus on strategic projects…”
– M A R S H A D U V D E V A N I
Manager
Database Administration IFF
Challenge
An acquisition andturnover caused adramatic increase in data-base administrationand monitoring needs.
Solution
IFF chose TUSC RemoteDBA to monitor itsOracle environments andmentor its Oracle DBA.
Results
IFF maintains over40 databases in7 countries with onefull-time DBA.
About TUSC
TUSC is an Oracle Advantage
Partner providing expert-level
integrated solutions to
Global 2000 customers since
1988. TUSC supports SAP
clients running on the Oracle
database through our Remote
DBA organization. We have
supported SAP running on
Oracle for many years with
our Remote DBA service while
also helping SAP clients
in performance tuning and
other DBA tasks through our
Database Administration
group. TUSC provides a
comprehensive set of con-
sulting services in the areas
of strategy, architecture,
implementation, support
and training.
Get information about TUSC
at www.tusc.com
or send an email to:
Phone +1 630-960-2909
69
Oracle is one of the most significant, DB plat-forms available for SAP systems – so why hasn’tsomeone written a book on how to configurethe interaction? Well, here it is: With thisin-depth reference book, administrators getmuch needed background knowledge, as wellas complete details on architectural andsoftware/logistics issues, in addition to step-by-step instructions for all of the most important administration tasks. Every aspectof system landscape planning and mainten-ance is covered, helping administrators honetheir problem solving skills. Bonus chaptersdeal with Java, SAP NetWeaver BI, and thehighly complex issues of Backup, Recovery,and Restoration.
What this book covers:
- Interaction of SAP and Oracle
- 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
Press comments:
IT & Production (09/2007).The publication on the interaction of SAP andOracle DBMS (Database Management System)provides administrators with basic knowledgeabout the SAP system and database, looks atarchitecture and software logistics issues andexplains administration tasks in SAP landsca-pes. It combines background knowledge withpractical guidance, helping the reader toaddress specific administration problems.For example, it contains advice on improvingthe performance of the system operation andimproving availability and data security.The book is equally suitable for administra-tors who want to upgrade a legacy SAP installation and Oracle experts who wish touse their know-how in conjunction with SAP.
S A P D A T A B A S E A D M I N I S T R A T I O N W I T H O R A C L E
A n d r é F a u s t m a n n , M i c h a e l H ö d i n g , G u n n a r K l e i n ,
R o n n y Z i m m e r m a n n
SAP Press – SAP Database Administrat ion with Oracle
SAP PRESS
818 p., 2008,
bound, with reference card
€89.95,
ISBN 978-1-59229-120-5
Immediate deliveryavailable
• 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
NetWeaver BI
70
“When it comes to technical challenges and opportunities, CSU Chico is the go-to school for the
Alliances program in the Americas – many of our new initiatives are begun at and deployed
from Chico. Chico’s NetWeaver/Oracle DB footprint is a model program.”
– A M E L I A M A U R I Z I O ,
Executive Director, Global University Alliances Program
C A L I F O R N I A S T A T E U N I V E R S I T Y , C H I C O
C O L L E G E O F B U S I N E S S – H O S T I N G
S A P O N O R A C L E
In 1996, SAP America selected the CaliforniaState University, Chico College of Business asits first North American partner in the SAPUniversity Alliance Program (SAP UAP).This program is designed to provide universityfaculty members throughout the world withthe tools and resources they need to incorporateSAP in their curriculum. This allows a businessprocess focus to the students’ coursework andallows faculty to use ERP technology in orderto teach students how to integrate businessprocesses and think strategically.
CSU Chico has an active industry advisoryboard that was excited about graduates whohave some SAP technical skills so HewlettPackard donated the first computer to Chico.The choice for the database was easy – Chicowas already using Oracle in all of the databaseclasses taught in the MIS (ManagementInformation Systems) program and there wasa desire on the part of the faculty to have bestof breed for both the Database and ERP. The fact that many of the industry partnersalso used SAP on Oracle did not go un-noticed.
Since 1996, the SAP UAP has grown to includealmost 800 campuses across the globe, provi-ding professional development opportunities tofaculty and supporting the development ofcourse materials that are shared among membercampuses. The SAP UAP also provides hostingservices to member institutions, eliminatingthe need for costly investments in hardwareand personnel.
In 2000, CSU Chico’s University CompetencyCenter (UCC), the team in the COB whoprovide system support to the faculty, officiallybecame a hosting center for University Allianceschools. In 2003, the UCC switched theiroperating system basis from HP-UX to SUSEEnterprise Linux and has remained on thatplatform since.
The UCC has used Oracle as its database ofchoice since the beginning, starting with ver-sion 7.3 and currently on 10.2. Oracle wasselected for many reasons. Since the College ofBusiness is a member of the Oracle AcademicInitiative and since Oracle is the industry leaderin database technology, it is used extensivelyin the curriculum. Thus, all of the students arefamiliar with Oracle. Further, Oracle’s scalabilityand reliability made it a natural for hosting themultiple SAP instances that the UCC supports.Gene Edinger, the head of the UCC, creditsOracle and its tools, particularly OEM, withhelping the UCC achieve 100% planned uptimefor the past 3 years, and with helping to detectand alleviate database problems in a proactivemanner.
When CSU, Chico began hosting, Chico’s UCCwas one of 7 hosting sites in North Americabut in January 2007 SAP streamlined theirhosting foot print by concentrating resourcesin a few centers world-wide and reducedthe number of world sites from over 20 to 5.Chico and the University of Wisconsin,Milwaukee became the mega-hosting sitesfor SAP in the Americas.
71
Chico went from hosting about 50 universi-ties to over 100 during 2007. The hosteduniversities are located in the United States,Canada, South America and India. The UCChas also hosted collaborative academic projectsbetween universities in the United States,Holland, Germany and Canada.Approximately 30,000 students and facultylog onto SAP through a Chico server eachyear. Our databases contain over 32 terabytes,while the hosting center has 100 terabytesavailable on 3 storage area networks.
While most of the schools using the servers atChico are doing transactions in SAP applicati-ons, primarily ECC 6.0 and BW, some of theschools currently being hosted are in the rese-arch space for SAP. Carnegie Mellon, MIT,and others recently began using the Chico ser-vers and expertise of the faculty in how SAPsupports business processes. This has raisedthe profile of Chico from that of primarily ateaching facility to one that can also supportresearch. For example, Oracle Corporationfunded a research project in 2006-07 thatprovided a proof of concept for running SAPApplications on Oracle RAC using Linux.Sun and NetApps provided the hardware nee-ded for the project and students used the pro-ject to fulfill course credit in an independentstudy project. In Fall 2007 the RAC teampresented their findings and results at OracleOpen World.
Perhaps the distinguishing characteristic ofthe Chico UCC is that the entire operation isrun using only 1.5 system’s staff with theremaining work all performed by studenthelp. The students complete the only hands-on Basis Administration class offered by anacademic alliances school before working parttime for the UCC. We have even had a fewstudents pass the SAP Basis certification examin SAP/Oracle. According to Ray Boykin, theAssociate Dean for the College, “we know weadd value to the students through the UCC.The students with the technical backgroundin SAP Basis and Oracle can go to work forcompanies with day one productivity.”
This statement is confirmed by a studypublished in the Journal of InformationSystems Education by Chico faculty thatfound students who complete even one of theSAP intensive classes in configuration or Basisare offered somewhere between $5K and$10K per year more than their non-SAPcounter-parts*.
“Market Power of ERP
Education – An Investiga-
tive Analysis”.
By:
James Sager,
James Mensching,
Gail Corbitt
and
James Connolly,
Journal of Information
Systems Education,
v. 17, n.2, pp. 151-161
Cal i fornia State University-CHICO hosting SAP on Oracle
72
Oracle 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
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
527843 10g and RAC for more details
527843 Oracle RAC support in the SAP environment
5740897 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
Useful l inks Oracle Database for SAP customers
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/orahttp://service.sap.com/dbaora-BC-DB-ORA-RAChttp://service/sap/com-PAM
73
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for information purposes only, and the contents here of are subject to change without notice. This document is not warranted to be error-free, nor
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This document is provided for informational purpose only and the information herein is subject to change without notice. Please report any errors
herein to Oracle ([email protected]). Oracle Corporation does not provide any warranties covering and specifically disclaims any liability
in connection with this document. Copyright © 2008 Oracle. All Rights Reserved. Published in the U.S.A.
Oracle Corporation
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Redwood Shores,
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U.S.A.
Published byOracle Corporation,Oracle for SAP GlobalTechnology Center
Albrecht [email protected]
Altrottstr. 3169190 Walldorf, GermanyTel. ++49 (0) 6227-8398 -0Fax ++49 (0) 6227-8398 -199E-mail:[email protected]
Internet:http://www.oracle.com/saphttp://www.sap.com/partner/index.htm
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