SAP Sybase Blog

Challenge 1: Massive Data Growth

Massive amounts of data is being created every year and as per he IDC EMC report data growth would be 40K Exabytes by 2020 :

http://germany.emc.com/collateral/about/news/idc-emc-digital-universe-2011-infographic.pdf

http://www.emc.com/collateral/analyst-reports/idc-the-digital-universe-in-2020.pdf

Challenge 2: Fast access to business decision making information.

Business & People want fast exact and correct answer of all questions from this massive amount of data.

Challenge 3: Current Technologies Can not deliver with this massive data growth.

Historical DBMS :

Historically database systems were designed to perform well on computer systems with limited RAM, this had the effect that slow disk I/O was the main bottleneck in data throughput. Consequently the architecture of these systems was designed with a focus on optimizing disk access, e. g. by minimizing the number of disk blocks (or pages) to be read into main memory when processing a query.

New Hardware Architecture ( up to or more 128 Cores of CPU and 2TB of RAM)

Computer architecture has changed in recent years. Now multi-core CPUs (multiple CPUs on one chip or in one package) are standard, with fast communication between processor cores enabling parallel processing. Main memory is no-longer a limited resource, modern servers can have 1 TB of system memory and this allows complete databases to be held in RAM. Currently server processors have up to 80 cores, and 128 cores will soon be available. With the increasing number of cores, CPUs are able to process increased data per time interval. This shifts the performance bottleneck from disk I/O to the data transfer between CPU cache and main memory

Need of In-memory Technology SAP HANA :

From the discussion above it is clear that traditional databases might not use current hardware most efficiently and not able to fulfill current and future business need.

The SAP HANA database is a relational database that has been optimized to leverage state of the art hardware. It provides all of the SQL features of a standard relational database along with a feature rich set of analytical capabilities.

Using groundbreaking in-memory hardware and software, HANA can manage data at massive scale, analyze it at amazing speed, and give the business not only instant access to real time transactional information and analysis but also more flexibility. Flexibility to analyze new types of data in different ways, without creating custom data warehouses and data marts. Even the flexibility to build new applications which were not possible before.

HANA Database Features

Important database features of HANA include OLTP & OLAP capabilities, Extreme Performance, In-Memory , Massively Parallel Processing, Hybrid Database, Column Store, Row Store, Complex Event Processing, Calculation Engine, Compression, Virtual Views, Partitioning and No aggregates. HANA In-Memory Architecture includes the In-Memory Computing Engine and In-Memory Computing Studio for modeling and administration. All the properties need a detailed explanation followed by the SAP HANA Architecture.

Source : www,sap.com and emc and idc reports.

Always consider to migrate the Development environment first , then UAT. Before moving to production Perform Regression testing on UAT enviornment.

Please consider to create the script to perform update stats,xp_postload(drop and re create index) for each and every database.

Steps for an ASE Database( You can repeat same steps for other databases) :

Step 1: Run the consistency checks in ASE database in Source (AIX) environment, to make sure that everything is fine.

Step 2: Put the database in single user mode.

Step3: Make sure there is no user activity on the Source Database .

Step 4: Run the sp_flushstats in the database.

Step 5: Take the backup of the database in Source (AIX) environment.

Step 6: Ftp the Files to Target environment. (AIX to Linux)

Step 7: Create and build the dataserver and databases in target Linux environment with exactly same configuration.
You might require to change some of the config param in Linux environment for performance point of view. ( Lets not discuss it here, as it is out of context).

Step 8: Also migrate the Login, roles from source server to target server

Step 9: Load the database in Linux environment.
(If there were user activity during dump process, load will be fail.)

Step 10: Online the database. If the target ASE version is new with source, It will also perform upgrade in this step.

Step 11:  Fix the corrupt indexes using the xp_postload. If the Database size is more than 20G, try drop and re-create index , in this case xp_postload would not be effective.

Step 12: Update the stats on all tables.

Step 13:  If there is replication setup in your environment, please setup replication after that.

Issue Faced:

1. If there is any user online during backup process, your load will fail( in the step for cross platform conversion).

2. After online database, we seen the -ve values in sp_helpdb output for few databases. There are two ways to fix this :

i) Try to run dbcc

dbcc usedextents(<DB name or DB ID>, 0, 1, 1)

ii) Use the Traceflag  7408 and 7409 in Run Server file and reboot the instance. It will not take much time as compare first option.

Traceflag 7408 : Force the server to scan *log segment* allocation pages; to recalculate free log space rather than use saved counts at boot time.
Traceflag 7409 : Force the server to scan *data* segment allocation pages; to recalculate free data page space rather than use saved counts at boot time.

Please let me know if you are planning for migration and need any assistance.

Wait is over Now !! 

Please download the Complete ebook for SAP Sybase ASE Q&A Bank Version 1.0  as below:

Newest Features

For those who are familiar with earlier versions of Sybase IQ, here are the new features added to from SAP Sybase IQ 15.

• Performance enhancements: The column store engine has been enhanced with extreme compression capabilities that improve I/O rates and reduce the amount of data to be stored on disk.
• High-speed data loading: High-performance data loading ingests large amounts of data faster than ever — from terabytes to petabytes — making big data available to applications and people faster.
• Improved scalability: Key improvements maintain high performance and efficiency for the growing volume of unpredictable, user-driven analytic workloads.
• Data protection: Administrators have further options for protecting the security of enterprise systems.
• Heightened availability: Enhancements help ensure that enterprise data is always available to business-critical analytics and dashboards.

Big data is a necessity at scale: if you’re trying to listen to every transatlantic phonecall, you need to use MapReduce. … if you need to search the entire internet in milliseconds you need to use MapReduce, if you need to run the largest social network in the world you need to use MapReduce. If you don’t you can probably scale with a database.

Full Story @ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/28/hadoop_no_sql_dont_believe_the_hype/

 

“Customers could choose to deploy ASE or Hana in whatever mix of configurations they want,” explained Prakash Darji, SAP’s global VP for data warehouse solutions & SAP Hana platform. SAP customers could use Hana to accelerate certain Business Suite processes while leaving other processes on ASE”

Source : http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/sap-sweetens-hana-deal-with-free-sybase/240146282?goback=.gde_4634032_member_204773060

Wishing Everyone a Very Merry Christmas and a Very Happy New Year 2013!

-
Team, sybaseblog.com

New features of ESD#2 and ESD#3 here:

• Fixes: With ESD#3 you get all of the fixes for database issues that have been made available since the initial release of release 15.7.
• In-row LOB compression: ASE can store LOB data in-row or off-row (on special LOB pages). Data compression was introduced with ASE 15.7, but in-row LOBs have not been compressed. With the new version you will get in-row LOB compression. For some SAP tables this can make a big difference. For an example, please have a look at this blog from Hüseyin Bilgen who shares his experiences.
• Hash-based statistics: This feature helps speed up the updating of index statistics.
• Plan sharing: In the past a database query that was executed more than once in parallel would result in multiple query plans which could be different (depending on the values provided at compilation time). When you are running ESD#3, plans for queries running in parallel are cloned, saving the cost of recompilation and ensuring that the queries use the same plan.
• Enhanced monitoring: You will see more metrics on several screens of the DBA Cockpit. Since we are using early versions of the ESDs in our development systems, we have already been able to include some of these in the DBA Cockpit versions released during summer 2012 (such as SAP_BASIS 7.02 SP12). For example: enhanced SQL statement statistics, spinlock monitoring, separation of I/O time in read time and write time… There are also new monitoring features that are going to be used in future versions of the DBA Cockpit. One example is the new history of database and transaction dumps.
• Talking about database and transaction dumps: There are several new features here that will make your life as a DBA easier. You can now run the dump transaction while a dump database is running. There is a new tool ‘sybrestore’ available with ESD#3 that will help you to restore the database when needed. We already updated our backup and recovery SAP Notes when ESD#2 was released to make use of the new features.
• Reorg rebuild can be run online. I don’t think I need to say more.
• The maximum size of a database is now 64TB. Just in case your compressed database was close to the 32TB limit before…
• Asynchronous DB initialization: If you are expanding your database, the database is now available immediately and initialization is done in the background.

Source : http://scn.sap.com/community/sybase-ase/blog/2012/12/21/sap-on-sybase-ase-news-week-51-2012-ase-1570030-released