This blog contains experience gained over the years of implementing (and de-implementing) large scale IT applications/software.

Category: Netweaver

Proving new Oracle Index in SAP Without a Transport

Let’s suppose you have created a new Oracle level index on a SAP table using SE11.
You’ve created it in DEV and proven that it changes the EXPLAIN PLAN using SQL Trace or Oracle level tools.

Unfortunately you don’t have a significant amount of data in your DEV instance, but you do have data in your UAT or integration test system.
You could release your workbench request that you will have created to create the new index in SE11, but this means a flurry of potential additional transports to remove it again if it doesn’t work.
You just want a proof of concept that can be removed again.

Since it’s entirely possible for you to create an index at the Oracle level below SAP, you just need to ensure that you create the index the same as SAP would.
You can choose a couple of methods to ensure this, but we will discuss the SAP biased method.

Using SE11, find the table on which the new index exists in DEV.

NOTE: We’re showing R/3 Enterprise, but it should be similar for Netweaver based systems.

Click the “Indexes…” button to list the indexes:

Double click the new index you created earlier.
Now on the menu, select “Utilities -> Activation Log”:

Click the magnifying glass icon next to the “Technical log for mass activation” option on the main screen.

Expand all the possible expansion icons:

Look for the text “CREATE” to find the create statement:

Copy the text and paste into SQL*Plus in any other SAP systems Oracle database to create the index.
You’re done.

Just remember that this index does not exist in the SAP data dictionary, so you must remove it once you have proven the EXPLAIN PLAN is working for the larger amount of data.

Disabling Change or Deactivation of SAP Audit Logging SM19 – SAL

To disable changing or deactivation of the SAP Audit Logging (SAL) settings via transaction SM19, you can remove the authorisation object S_ADMI_FCD activity AUDA.
(see https://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/SMAUTH/S_ADMI_FCD).

This would prevent “normal” BASIS administrators from being capable of changing or disabling audit logging, but permit you to provide an emergency user with this capability (you will need to change SAL settings in SM19 at some point!).

SAP Short Dump SYSTEM_NO_TASK_STORAGE

A background job has produced a short dump with SYSTEM_NO_TASK_STORAGE.
The “Heap Memory” section in ST02 showed a maximum use of 1.5GB, but we had allocated nearly 1.9GB according to the “abap/heap_area_nondia” and “abap/heap_area_dia” instance profile parameters.

The ST02 short dump analysis shows the source code line where the problem occurred. The line of code doesn’t look specifically interesting, it is, however, requiring a slight increase in memory allocation.
If the program is running in DIALOG then it will be allocated Extended Memory first, followed by HEAP (local process) memory.
If the program is running in BACKGROUND then it will be allocated HEAP memory first, followed by Extended Memory.

Extended Memory is pre-allocated at system startup according to the EM initial setting in the SAP instance profile.  It is then increased up to the maximum specified in the instance profile per user and per application server.
HEAP memory is only allocated as it is needed within each of the SAP dw.* OS processes, up to the maximum specified (in instance profile) per user or per application server.  It is then released back to the OS when the process finishes processing (SAP restarts the work process) and it has used over a specific amount of memory as set in parameter abap/heaplimit.

Since this was a background job, we can assume that we exhausted HEAP memory and should have automatically switched to Extended Memory.
However, the Kernel section of the short dump showed that we may have experienced an issue obtaining more virtual memory from the OS:

*** Error in libunwind: Out of memory. Try with a higher value >
 > for UNWIND_RESERVE_MEM (current value = 16).
 (0) 0x40000000017ae480 [dw.sapXXX_DVEBMGS01]
 (1) 0x40000000017ae2b0 [dw.sapXXX_DVEBMGS01]
 (2) 0x40000000021de880 [dw.sapXXX_DVEBMGS01]
 (3) 0x40000000021e45d0 [dw.sapXXX_DVEBMGS01]
 (4) 0x400000000115e860 [dw.sapXXX_DVEBMGS01]
 (5) 0x400000000120b3a0 [dw.sapXXX_DVEBMGS01]
 (6) 0x40000000010542f0 [dw.sapXXX_DVEBMGS01]
 (7) 0x4000000001111940 [dw.sapXXX_DVEBMGS01]
 (8) 0x40000000011ae790 [dw.sapXXX_DVEBMGS01]
 (9) 0x40000000012fb090 [dw.sapXXX_DVEBMGS01]
 (10) 0x40000000012fd7d0 [dw.sapXXX_DVEBMGS01]
 (11) 0x400000000188cae0 [dw.sapXXX_DVEBMGS01]
 (12) 0x4000000001896e70 [dw.sapXXX_DVEBMGS01]
 (13) 0x4000000001891670 [dw.sapXXX_DVEBMGS01]
 (14) 0x40000000018949a0 [dw.sapXXX_DVEBMGS01]
 (15) 0x400000000187f1e0 [dw.sapXXX_DVEBMGS01]
 (16) 0x40000000014d1ce0 [dw.sapXXX_DVEBMGS01]
 (17) 0x400000000149e8d0 [dw.sapXXX_DVEBMGS01]
 (18) 0x4000000001496fc0 [dw.sapXXX_DVEBMGS01]
 (19) 0x4000000001364c30 [dw.sapXXX_DVEBMGS01]
 (20) 0x4000000000ed4af0 [dw.sapXXX_DVEBMGS01]
 (21) 0x4000000000ed4a90 [dw.sapXXX_DVEBMGS01]
 (22) 0xc000000000045880 main_opd_entry + 0x50 [/usr/lib/hpux64/dld.so]

Is this case, you could either add more OS memory (essentially you have over allocated memory somewhere), or you could resize the abap/heap_area_nondia parameter to a smaller amount, so that it will switch to EM sooner.

Documenting an SAP ABAP System Technical Configuration

The following are my thoughts for documenting the technical configuration of an existing SAP ABAP stack:

                ENVIRONMENTS                             
                ARCHITECTURE OVERVIEW                         
                OPERATING SYSTEM DETAILS                    
                                PATCHES             
                                PARAMETERS   
                                USERS  
                DATABASE SYSTEM DETAILS                       
                                PATCHES             
                                PARAMETERS   
                                SAP SCHEMAS  
                                DB LINK INTERFACES     
                SAP KERNEL DETAILS                     
                                PARAMETERS   
                SAP COMPONENT DETAILS                         
                ABAP STACK DETAILS                    
                                LICENSES            
                                OPERATION MODES      
                                CLIENTS               
                                TMS      
                                STANDARD SAP JOBS & SCHEDULES        
                                NON-STANDARD JOBS & SCHEDULES     
                                SPOOL SERVERS               
                                OUTPUT DEVICES            
                                SYSTEM USERS 
                                DATABASE CHECKS AND JOBS   
                                CCMS MONITORING     
                CUSTOM DEVELOPMENTS                          
                                TRANSACTIONS               
                                PROGRAMS AND REPORTS         
                                FUNCTION MODULES   
                                BAPIS   
                                INTERFACES      
                                                System Landscape Directory
                                                Central User Administration
                                                Solution Manager Data Collection
                                                Integration Server
                                                RFCs
                                                Web Services
                                                JDBC Connectors
                SNOTES AND REPAIRS                    

Populate User Groups into SU01 Authorization Group

If you have followed my previous post on how to create SAP user groups en-mass, then you may wish to know how you can assign one of these groups as the security group (as per the security group box in SU01).

Simply setup your groups as per my previous post, then use the following SQL at the database level to perform the assignment to the user account in SU01.

NOTE: The script will apply each group it finds to the user accounts. If more than one group is assigned to a user, then only one of those groups will be used. The order will depend on the order of records returned in the inline cursor.

set serveroutput on size 1000;

DECLARE
   CURSOR c_ug IS SELECT BNAME,USERGROUP,MANDT FROM USGRP_USER;
BEGIN

FOR ug IN c_ug LOOP

UPDATE USR02 SET CLASS=ug.USERGROUP WHERE BNAME=ug.BNAME and MANDT=ug.MANDT;

DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE ('User: '||ug.BNAME || ' Group: '||ug.USERGROUP);

END LOOP;

END;