Many experienced developers are not aware that moving BW to HANA can in some cases result in slower transformations during data loads. Thankfully, SAP is providing a tool to identify areas in your ABAP code that may benefit from an optimization. In this blog we take a quick look at this valuable tool.
By Dr. Berg
Background
During development of SAP BW Extract Transforms and data Load (ETL) there are many options to create transformations in DTPs in BW 7.x and in older Update and Transfer rules in BW 3.x. Unfortunately, depending on your developers, some of the custom transforms may have sub-optimal ABAP coding can have impacts on how SAP BW ETL performs after the migration to HANA.
Thankfully, SAP’s talented developer Marc Bernard provides an automated tool to help you identify potential coding issues. This program is called the “SAP NetWeaver BW ABAP Routine Analyzer”, or technically ZBW_ABAP_ANALYZER.
Figure 1: Input Screen for SAP NetWeaver BW ABAP Routine Analyzer
Overall, the tool looks for and suggests the following fixes:
- a. Select for all entries (SFAE) statements without HANA DB hints --> add hints
- b. Select * --> specify fields to select
- c. Database access in the field routines --> move to start routine
- d. Loops which do not assign field symbols --> use field symbols
- e. Selects from master data tables --> Use the read master data rule
- f. Selects from DSOs --> Use the read DSO rule
- g. Direct updates to BW object tables --> Do not update tables directly
- h. and many more areas...
You can run this program either as on-line, or as a background job. If you run the program on-line (only recommended for a small selection), you can click a link in the output to edit the transformation, transfer rule or update rule.
Figure 2: On-Line Output for SAP NetWeaver BW ABAP Routine Analyzer
If you run in the background, you can save a log to SLG1 and also create a spool list for further analysis.
Figure 3: SAP NetWeaver BW ABAP Routine Analyzer - On-Line Spool list
For organizations that have slow data loads where most of the time is used on transforms and loads, this is a key program that should be run as part of the BW HANA migration planning. The tool should be available for general access in April this year.
Some Observations
The last six weeks in this HANA blog series we have looked at many of the HANA migration tools that Marc and SAP has provided, and I continue to be amazed at both the quality and the speed at which SAP is rolling out tools to make any HANA migration as easy as possible.
In the next blog we will look an in-depth look at some of the ways you can balance the load on the nodes in a HANA system when working with a scale out environment.
Thanks,
Dr. Berg