Diary of a Confused DBA…..

At the beginning of writing this page I better confess that the strategy I used is not always a recommended process but obviously my own learning. Besides SAP performance tuning is always a new chapter in any-ones learning diary.

Tuning of an SAP system is actually a a job of a multispecialist team, it is not one man show at all, because it involves the hardware, operating system, clustering software if any, the database, SAP application, network and user behaviour. Added to all of them you will have a lot of limitation on the supporting and non supporting mandates from different vedor including SAP, and non communicative attitude of the engineers and consultant working in a SAP setup is a free gift with the product.

Consider a landscape of open source operating system, and SAP with Oracle database, almost 5000 concurrent users across the globe and very strict SLA with max 2 hours schedule downtime a month. Let’s start from a very odd news, your system admin called you up at midnight asking you that CPU utilization of your database server went beyond 85 % and you need to act upon finding out the actual culprit and then act accordingly. This you need to accomplish, in a very short time span. Because a little extra pressure in the system may lead to a hunged state and you need non other than a shutdown what you hate.

Consider the case where you will find that the even a standard SAP program is giving timeout or memory problem and this is happening at the right time, that is the busiest time – book closing time….Or consider a customised program is causing nuisance, i.e. your DBA reporting you that the generation of redolog increased 20 times which is not at all what you can expect and also effecting your current DR strategy.

Worst even you may find a transaction generating excessive locks and the whole system appearing to standstill do the peer users across the globe who is trying to use the same transaction or using transaction which is using same underlying object. This is quite obvious, that lot of similar other issues will add up in the list. I will try organising the same in different criteria like Database, SAP, OS etc and in the sub pages will go adding them.

Once again, this is not a directive, but a sharing of experience how I do it….Wherever possible I will go on citing the references of SAP notes, oracle metalink etc but this is purely my own way to do, I got success most of the cases, and if it can help you nothing like it…..