White Paper
Accelerate
your existing SAP ERP Processes using Application Accelerators
Milind Mungaji
|
Monday, September
26, 2016
|
This white paper intents to
improve the performance of the existing SAP applications running on ECC systems
using SAP Application Accelerator Addon without the need to install the SAP High-Performance
Analytic Appliance(HANA). The Application Accelerator, or Suite
Accelerator, is an application which combines SAP R/3 or ERP (or indeed any
NetWeaver-based system) and replicates database tables within it to SAP HANA
using SAP's trigger-based replication system, SLT and the SWT2DB Add-On. Then,
existing database functions are pointed away from the regular RDBMS and towards
SAP HANA. The effect of this is that long-running SQL statements run much
faster: 100-1000 times faster in most cases.
Here are some of the scenarios
where Application Accelerator would add value!
Ø
Financial Accounting Overhead
Ø
costing/accrual calculation Financial Statements
(Period Accounting)
Ø
Material Ledger - Period End Closing, BW
Extraction, Price Analysis & Virtual InfoProvider
Ø
Interface material ledger
Ø
Enhancements in ML drilldown reporting
Ø
FI-AA interface - SAPLABRA, SAPDBADA,
Reconciliation & Enhancements
Ø
Hierarchy processing
Ø
Overhead rates
Ø
Percentage method
Ø
FI Line Item Browsers
Ø
Materials management
Ø
BI reporting via DataSource
What if I want to speed up my own
application scenario?
All you need to do is to setup SLT replication for the database tables
that you need replicated and then use ABAP report RDA_MAINTAIN to maintain
database tables and programs to be accelerated. SAP does the rest for you
automatically! It automatically changes the code and SQL to point to SAP HANA
for the programs and tables that you defined.
1.1 Minimum System
requirements:
1. SAP ERP 6.0 Unicode system.
2. Kernel 7.21+ (similar to 7.20 but also supports
Application Accelerator)
3. SWT2DB as per SAP Note 1696402
4. SAP Lanscape Transformation Replicator (SLT)
5. DMIS_2010_XXX in the source system and
DMIS_2010_700 in the SLT system
6. SAP HANA Database Client on both SLT and source
system.
1.2 Configuration
Steps:
a. Customizing:
Ø
Activate Redirect Database Access (RDA)
Ø
Define Scenarios(table, main program, job name)
Ø
Maintain Secondary database connection
Ø
Upload and activate scenario XML
Ø
Set Secondary Database Connection per Scenario
b. Additional Steps:
Ø
Replicate identified tables using SLT
Ø
Run your program
Ø
Verify selects are executed against HANA(ST05)
Ø
Check replicated tables in HANA using
transaction SE16H
Benefits of Accelerators:
Ø
Speed up SAP ERP Processes by reading the mass
data (time consuming selects) from SAP HANA.
Ø
Keep existing reports
Ø
Protect investment
Ø
Limited changes to existing coding
Ø
User Acceptance as there are no UI changes.
Ø
Preserve Authorizations
Ø
Easy Implementation-> Easy to switch ON and
OFF.
How does licensing work?
This is the great thing: you only need to license SAP HANA for the
compressed database tables that you are transferring and not for the whole ERP
size. So if you have a 500GB database table, and it compresses 5:1 then you
only need 100GB of HANA data. This may be in the context of a much larger ERP
environment!
2.1 The most important thing is that SAP HANA accelerates complex
database questions massively. If your scenario has a small number of very
complex SQL statements (like all the SAP built-in examples described above)
then SAP HANA custom AA or 2DBC will massively improve performance.
Take the following example:
SELECT * INTO CORRESPONDING FIELDS OF TABLE lt_vbak
FROM vbak CONNECTION ('HAN')
WHERE auart IN s_auart
AND erdat IN s_erdat.
SELECT * INTO CORRESPONDING FIELDS OF TABLE lt_vbak
FROM vbak CONNECTION ('HAN')
WHERE auart IN s_auart
AND erdat IN s_erdat.
LOOP AT
lt_vbak INTO ls_vbak.
SELECT * FROM vbap CONNECTION ('HAN')
INTO CORRESPONDING FIELDS OF ls_vbap
WHERE vbeln = ls_vbak-vbeln.
WRITE: / ls_vbak-vbeln, ls_vbak-auart, ls_vbak-erdat,
ls_vbap-posnr, ls_vbap-matnr, ls_vbap-zmeng.
ENDSELECT.
ENDLOOP.
SELECT * FROM vbap CONNECTION ('HAN')
INTO CORRESPONDING FIELDS OF ls_vbap
WHERE vbeln = ls_vbak-vbeln.
WRITE: / ls_vbak-vbeln, ls_vbak-auart, ls_vbak-erdat,
ls_vbap-posnr, ls_vbap-matnr, ls_vbap-zmeng.
ENDSELECT.
ENDLOOP.
Note that for a potentially huge selection in table VBAK (the Sales
Document Header), we then read table VBAP (Sales Document Item) for each
document. This is very expensive using the 2DBC compared to what can happen if
we push a bigger question down into SAP HANA as follows:
SELECT
vbak~vbeln vbak~auart vbak~erdat
vbap~posnr vbap~matnr vbap~zmeng
CONNECTION ('HAN')
INTO TABLE lt_vbak_vbap
FROM vbak
INNER JOIN vbap ON vbak~vbeln = vbap~vbeln
WHERE vbak~auart IN s_auart
AND vbak~erdat IN s_erdat.
vbap~posnr vbap~matnr vbap~zmeng
CONNECTION ('HAN')
INTO TABLE lt_vbak_vbap
FROM vbak
INNER JOIN vbap ON vbak~vbeln = vbap~vbeln
WHERE vbak~auart IN s_auart
AND vbak~erdat IN s_erdat.
LOOP AT
lt_vbak_vbap INTO ls_vbak_vbap.
WRITE: / ls_vbak_vbap-vbeln, ls_vbak_vbap-auart, ls_vbak_vbap-erdat,
ls_vbak_vbap-posnr, ls_vbak_vbap-matnr, ls_vbak_vbap-zmeng.
ENDLOOP.
WRITE: / ls_vbak_vbap-vbeln, ls_vbak_vbap-auart, ls_vbak_vbap-erdat,
ls_vbak_vbap-posnr, ls_vbak_vbap-matnr, ls_vbak_vbap-zmeng.
ENDLOOP.
Note that in this case, we push more logic into SAP HANA and also only
return the columns that we need, which means that the SQL executed in SAP HANA
will be much more efficient. It's important to note that you should also avoid
transferring large volumes of records over 2DBC - the fetch times are more
expensive than for a traditional database.
It's also worth noting that the SQL needs to be expensive in the first
place and therefore you may get much smaller benefits in a Development
environment with a few thousand records compared to a massive benefit in
Production with a few hundred million records. You can model this by testing
SQL statements in SAP HANA Studio to compare response times.
4.2 Scenario Accelerators
Ex. SAP CO-PA Accelerators
i.
SAP MDG HANA, Sukant, Dec 2013.
ii.
SAP Teched Session CD166, SAP, Nov 2012
iv.
SAP Note 1713986, 1716826.
