If you’re running SAP NetWeaver applications and you don’t know about the Oracle 12c In-Memory Toolkit for SAP NetWeaver then this post is for you. Based on work done by the Oracle Real World Performance Team, the Oracle 12c In-Memory Toolkit can be used to enable your SAP applications to take advantage of Oracle Database In-Memory on Oracle Database 12c. The toolkit is also available as SAP Note 2351252.

The toolkit works with SAP BW as well as  OLTP-like applications, for example SAP ECC and SAP SCM.

In the case of SAP BW, the toolkit enables In-Memory for all NetWeaver 7.x versions supported for Oracle Database 12c. There is no need to be on the latest SAP BW version. The toolkit allows you to populate specific SAP BW objects (i.e. DSO, InfoCubes, etc.) into the Database In-Memory column store (IM column store). To replace an existing BWA the toolkit generates In-Memory materialized views.

For OLTP-like applications such as ECC and SCM, the toolkit helps to generate and manage the tables for real-time reporting. Once these tables are populated into the IM column store, the real-time reports can be run directly on the OLTP system with no impact on the OLTP workload. Real-time reports in this context mean dashboard type reports. For example, reports that answer questions like what is the revenue to date? Which material has the lowest inventory? How many sales orders were processed this week, this month, this quarter?  For these kinds of reports there is no need to export the data to BW or any other tool!

For decades, SAP reports are written with the following methodology:

  • Step 1: Read the entire table(s) of interest into the application server
  • Step 2: On the application server run through FOR LOOPs to apply the report logic within the FOR LOOP and check the logic against the database
  • Step 3: Spool the report

This obsolete style of data processing dates back to the days of the mainframe with the goal of saving expensive CPU cycles. It is much more efficient with databases like Oracle to focus on set based processing rather than row by row processing in the application. The Oracle database can process large row sets much more efficiently and this type of processing also leverages all of the optimizations in the IM column store. In short, you should also think about simplifying your old-fashioned SAP reports to fully utilize the performance improvements of Oracle Database and Database In-Memory.

The toolkit will generate SQL scripts to enable objects to be populated into the IM column store. The toolkit consists of a tar file that contains SQL scripts and instructions on how to use the toolkit. In addition to that there is also contact information if you need help or want to provide feedback, and a link to an Oracle Learning Library tutorial to help you set up and use the toolkit.

Original publish date: July 5, 2017