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

Blog Readership, Almost 7,000

Since December 2013, my blog readership has really taken off.
It’s nearly at 7,000 page views per month:

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Which is the most popular post of all time, well it’s still my multi-post guide to basic performance tuning a SAP system (published in 2011), but very closely followed by my recent HANA installation into a VM post.
You will also notice that a lot of readers are looking for the FICO authorisation objects F_REGU_BUK and F_REGU_KOA:

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We can see that the US is very dominant in the stats, secondly India and then Germany.  The UK is in 4th place:

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It’s a close call between IE and Chrome in the browsers used.
Good job I’ve written my free extension for searching SAP notes, in Chrome!

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Thanks for reading everyone.
I hope I’ve provided you with the solutions you’ve sought.

Darryl

Fuci Fuci insect Italia

Whilst in Puglia in the south of Italy, I’ve come across the locally named Fuci Fuci insect (in dialeto) which is Puliese dialect for “run run”.
A quick search of the internet doesn’t tell you what this insect is actually called, based on the dialect name, not surprising.
It’s a member of the centipede family and is known as the House Centipede.  It is documented here:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scutigera_coleoptrata
It’s harmless and is probably on the hunt for spiders!
Still, it creeps me out that something can run 0.5 meters in 1 second!

Broken 2,000 page views per month!

Just a quick note to say thanks to all readers who have recommended this site, my posts and articles, commented or just browsed.  I’m glad that it has served so many people and I’ve really enjoyed seeing the reader count increase over the past months.

I’ve finally made it past the 2,000 page views per month target after only 18 months of being an active blogger.  I’m now hoping to hit 5,000 in the next 6 months…

If you have found this site helpful, then help others find it by clicking the Google +1 link on posts, or linking on your own blog site or Linkedin or Facebook.

Many thanks,

Darryl

Downtime & Language Barriers

Whilst I took some time out on holiday, I was able to get away from the almost non-existent UK summer and off to a much warmer climate.
It got me thinking about the language of IT and the difficulties that other non-native English speakers may be exposed too when trying to decipher Oracle docs or SAP notes, or any other form of documentation.

In my experience, I’ve often had difficulty reading SAP notes that have been translated to English from German and Oracle docs that have been written in English from the off, but badly worded.
I think the Plain English Campaign would have a field day with some of the material I’ve had to put up with.

If you’re working with a mission critical system and you can’t be 100% sure on what the documentation is asking you to do, could it reflect badly on you as a professional?  Possibly.

I guess Google Translate is probably the most preferred tool for translating notes and docutentation, unless the reader is confident enough in what they already know.
So would this mean those that perform IT as a profession, in a non-English speaking country, must know the products more in-depth and rely less on the documentation?  Maybe.

R/3 to ECC – Benefits of not upgrading anything?

This is a question that will probably be asked by many IT persons over the coming months, as SAP draws to a close support for the SAP R/3 4.7 system.
(see the SAP production availability matrix https://service.sap.com/pam).
Whilst upgrading to ECC will mean a SAP supported system, what other options are out there?
Let’s look at just a few so that you may have some ideas that you maybe hadn’t considered.

– Stay where you are and pay for extended support.
This is an interesting option.  Let’s face it, if you use SAP as a basic product e.g. for accounting or sales transactions, then exactly what else will you need from a product in the future?  Why not save the upgrade costs and simply pay for extended support, and keep paying each time it expires.
Whilst the initial support costs may be known, the future costs are not and SAP could hike these.  Also, there may be a fairly straight upgrade path to a newer product at the moment, but in the future you may have to follow that path, plus the additional paths and intricacies of upgrades to later versions in order to reach something more modern (UNICODE anyone!).
Things like OS support may bite you eventually, and those of you on HP-UX Itanium are already seeing what happens to non-x86 based operating systems when companies like Oracle decide to stop supporting you.  Your future upgrade path could involve skill-sets no longer available/costly, or even more lengthy processes because you’re moving from older hardware.
On the positive side, the future could hold hope in the form of faster systems, smarter tools and cheaper processes that could make future upgrades/migrations faster and cheaper than doing it now.  A big database in the future may not be so big in relational terms.

– Stay where you are and don’t pay for extended support.
You will loose all access to standard SAP support sites and tools, plus you will not benefit from any DB updates or DB vendor support.
This could be very problematic if your business needs to apply SAP legal patches for changes to HR related functions within the SAP modules.
I’m not entirely sure if you will still be able to request SCCR keys for modifying SAP objects or even be able to develop your own ABAP code in your own system.  Maybe someone can let me know on that one.
Some of the words in Oracle Database support contracts state that you may have to back-pay for support if you decide to re-enable support at a later date.  I’m not sure if SAP would be the same.
You would potentially suffer during external audits if additional security related legislation comes along (SOX for example) and you are not able to apply the updates/functionality to provide that security.

There are some common issues with both options above.  These mainly centre around the IT resources that are supporting those systems.  Nobody likes to stay still in IT.  Not unless they are happy in the knowledge that retirement is looming and they just need to keep rolling in the meantime.
The constant need to keep abreast of the latest technical enhancements/changes is one of the most difficult aspects of the IT profession.
However, with the advent of off-shore IT resources, it should be possible to secure long-term support resources even if you can’t secure them on-shore.  Having said that, I don’t yet know of any off-shore company that has a high retention level.  Maybe this is coming…

In summary, there are some cost advantages in the short term for not upgrading an SAP system.  But unfortunately those costs may hit you in the end in some form or another.