Now, I may be biased, but I had to start off with this quote from Jon Reed

Before I get to the videos, I want to say that Basis is one of the most neglected areas in terms of SAP career content. Even on SDN, there are way more conversations and forums on development than Basis. This is too bad, as the Basis/NetWeaver Admin role is a vital one to most projects.

No one else is managing your career or your future. If you want more control and choice over where you work and what you do, I recommend you read Jon Reed’s latest career advice and career trends. Jon is an SAP Mentor and his name is probably familiar to you already through his SCN blogs and ASUG and Sapphire presentations. He’s got about 15 years experience in analyzing the SAP career market, and he has worked in SAP recruitment. This all adds up to someone who knows what the SAP job market is looking for, and what makes some candidates more marketable than others.

The white papers Jon created are

• SAP Career Outlook 2010 – Part One: Creating a Winning SAP Skills Strategy for 2010, and
• SAP Career Outlook 2010 – Part Two: Beyond the Social Networking Hype: Achieving SAP Career Visibility

You can also access the white paper on Jon Reed’s website.

However, one thing you will notice is that these particular whitepapers emphasise the functional and developer career paths; there is not much reference to the BASIS or Netweaver Technical Consultant career path. Jon identified this himself in another post, this time on his web site, What is the SAP Career Path for Basis Administrators – NetWeaver Engineers?. He has taken a presentation on the career path for Basis-NetWeaver prosby SAP Mentor Tony de Thomasis of Australia Post (based in part on Jon’s earlier work referred to above) and taped four commentary tracks through Tony’s Prezi slides.

…. just resting on our laurels isn’t going to cut it in this economy – “stronger measures” are required. Part four gave me a chance to share my views on the content as a whole, and why it’s so important to find an SAP career path that combines skills marketability with a passionate, or even soulful, angle.

I used to say I was in BASIS (which is why this blog was called basissap.com). However, many people seem to see this as being restricted to R3 ABAP Administration, with perhaps some particular combination of OS and DBMS skills. Nowadays, regardless of the platform your SAP system(s) run on, BASIS Administrators / Netweaver Engineers need knowledge of their site’s OS / DBMS combination, good windows server administration skills (for managing your TREX, and possibly EP, systems), maxdb knowledge (for your SRM system), etc etc.

With all these skill requirement, possibly including other duties as well (depending on the size of your environment), how do you avoid being jack of all trades and master of none ?

For your own sake, you pick two (maybe three) Core Skills in BASIS or Netweaver and become the local guru in those. This provides security of employment; in other words, you know enough about the SAP core to be valuable to both your current employer, and future employers.

Pick another couple of areas that interest you, but aren’t crucial to your organisation (at least, not yet). Jon refers to these as Edge Skills. They should be skills that are on the horizon, either within the SAP ecosystem, or your organisation. These are the skills that will make you employable in the future.

But what about all the other areas ? In one of my previous incarnations, I was an MVS Systems Programmer. The most important thing I learnt was how to use the manuals (they weren’t online when I started). A key part of this was my own notes – Knowing where to find the official answer or process isn’t always enough, you need to get it working, and sometimes you only perform the process once every couple of years or so, and it is difficult to remember exactly how it works from time to time.

Keeping records of what works and what doesn’t work, especially in relation to your own environment, gives you an edge on those who don’t, and of course, it is nice to know what the real process is (as opposed to what the books say !!).

A word of advice here; do not horde your documentation or knowledge –

• its hard to get moved to the exciting new project if you’re irreplaceable, and
• after all, you’re getting paid to support and help.

It also identifies you as someone who will help, who will answer questions about (or can find out) what really works.

Another way of finding out stuff is experimenting with your own system; an SAP preview system, or one of the New Community Developer Systems. These systems, well removed from the semi production status of the ‘real’ Development and Testing systems, provide scope for you to experiment and develop ideas into implementable services. This identifies you as someone who can bring real value to the SAP Environment, the IT organisation, and your employer in general.

A standard BASIS problem is the generic “what is it doing and why ?” question. This could be in the context of debugging a program or process, or trying to work out what configuration changes are required to make something work. It generally occurs when the development or functional team have moved on, leaving someone who knows what to do but not why – usually a user (under pressure from their boss) who just wants to get the system doing what they’ve been told it should be doing….

However, your BASIS team (or person) has to be a jack of all trades, with not just a smattering of SAP functional knowledge, but also a working knowledge of Networking, Desktop PCs, the Operating System(s) and Databases(s) their SAP systems are running on and so on.

I’ve found that the best way of dealing with this need to know something about everything is not by trying to know everything, but by knowing how to find out everything. An example of this is comes from Jerome Mungapen’s SAPLOG, where he provides a useful reminder of some of the various ways of finding what tables and fields lie behind an SAP transaction:

Have you ever been frustrated trying to find which table and field a piece of data is stored in. You can see it on the screen, and the old faithful F1 – F9 results in some useless structure information. Or have you ever started looking at a piece of functionality you are unfamiliar with wanting to find the table structures behind it in SAP. Well this article shows my favorite five ways of digging under the hood to find out what’s going on.

Jerome lists five methods, but one of them assumes you have the time (and need) to get really in depth knowledge of a given area of SAP. I’ve listed the four methods I use (plus Jerome’s extra one) in the order I’ use them when closely examining or debugging a transaction I’m unfamiliar with.

Use a Different Field

If the technical information pop up shows a structure and not a real field, just try another field on the same area of the screen. It is surprising how often this works !!

Use Where Used on the Data Element

From the technical information pop up, select the data element then press Navigate to get to the Data Dictionary. Once there, press the Where Used button.

Trace Analysis

Transactions SE30 Runtime Analysis and ST05 SQL Trace can be over-kill for determining what fields and tables are being used, but can be used to see how (for example) configuration data controls how and / or when the fields and tables are updated. It’s also useful when dealing with Z or Y code, structures and tables.

SE80 Object Navigator

This is probably more useful for a functional person, and is not available on the older SAP releases anyway. However, if you know the program behind the transaction, you can use SE80 to find all the Data Dictionary objects (including tables and fields) associated with that program.

Environmental Analysis

For those requiring a wider understanding of how a given area works in the SAP system. Jerome’s explanation of Environmental Analysis says it all.

SAP have detected a problem in the spool area which affects all customers in the world regardless of the SAP release and any support package level.

As soon as the retention time of a spool request exceeds 2009/12/31 a wrong date 2100/01/01 is entered during creation of the spool request. As a consequence these spool requests will not be deleted anymore from the spool reorg jobs. Using the default retention period this affects all spool requests on each SAP system in the world created since 2009/12/23.

OSS Note 1422843 already contains the correction instructions and the relevant kernel patches for 3.1 –> 46B (one patch) and 46c –> 7.xx (another patch). There’s nothing for anyone (unfortunate enough to be) running any of the original 2.x systems yet.

It is a little ironic – An old friend and I were discussing Y2K and all that in a general “what were you doing ten years ago ?” manner on New Years Eve. Should I tell her that SAP had a Y2K+10 ?

SAP (or rather, SDN) has announced a Code Exchange program. It would seem, however, that the idea of ownership and liability, and ultimately, licensing has to raise it’s head.

A piece of software that is developed by SDN developers and shared under an open source license would likely use SAP Enterprise Services, utilize SAP Data Dictionary elements, call a BAPI or any similar technical facility that is essentially SAP’s intellectual property, and for which SAP requires signature of a software license agreement.

and

SAP has a decade-long history of sharing ABAP code with its customers, so they can modify the system to their requirements. However, that does not make the ABAP code open source; on the contrary, the code is only accessible after agreeing to SAP software license agreements. Those agreements govern what can be done with ABAP source code modifications, and what kind of add-ons can be built on top of SAP functionality. Code Exchange governs only sharing of add-ons, but modifications of ABAP application source code is not covered.

(Both extracts are from Michael Bechauf’s excellent On SDN Code Exchange, Open Source and Free Software.)

Now, I understand that SAP feel the need protect their reputation and the reputation of their products, and that they need to serve their shareholders first. But I was wondering if they had forgotten where it all started… A long time ago, when Dinosaurs ruled the earth, before they were told to go away and die, and the only thing bigger than a Brontosaurus was IBM’s hold on the computing business, people wanted to share code. And so came about the one of the oldest ‘Code Exchange’ programs still active, the IBM mainframe based CBT Tape. Have a look at this extract from the CBT FAQ:

Q. So you are sure the software here is free. I don’t need a license or something?
A. Yes it’s free. No you don’t need license. Some people have trouble understanding why so many great programmers just give away their work to help others. Let my freind Mike explain.

The CBT Tape is used to share customer written programs and utilities, developed for IBM’s Z/OS (and the earlier equivalents) mainframe operating systems. Note that we aren’t talking about 1960’s version of ‘warez’ or freeware or demonstration programs – this is working code that can be cut-and-pasted, used how you see fit etc. In fact, nowadays, you don’t even need a mainframe to read it. Code Sharing before the airlines stole the phrase.

Mainframe programmers faced similar issues to the ones that we face today:
• a need to find better ways of doing ’stuff’,
• a need to share the better ’stuff’ that people were doing,
• vendor code that was open source, but copyright, and
• a potentially litigious vendor with very good lawyers

In reality, all it took was a recognition by everyone involved that
• this code was written by people you didn’t know,
• to solve problems that may or may not mirror yours,
• to run in environments that may or may not mirror yours, and
• that said environment would require IBM licensing.

There was one other concept that made it work, made comfortable for people to use the shared code. The default was Open Source – both free speech and free beer. Of course, as a contributor, you could license your code any way you wanted, but it was then up to you to enforce it. And quite frankly, what would the point be ? The originators of the CBT were taking the (realistic) view that people will copy working code if they can, so there was no point in trying to impose conditions they couldn’t control.

I grew and matured my computing skills in this kind of environment, where cooperation was expected, I have implemented code from the CBT tape, and I continue to follow its philosophy. If I come across an interesting piece of ABAP, Java, shell script or batch file at work, I will return to it to see what I can learn. There’s an old saying that the difference between plagiarism and research is the number of sources you copied from. I make no apology for researching the best code and methodologies for my customers. Its what they pay me to do.

If I do plagiarise, I’ll note where it came from (apart from politeness, it helps to know where to look for help with it), but if I research code, then any errors and omissions are mine and mine alone. Given that I take responsibility for what I publish under my name, then SAP’s new Code Exchange is just another source (pun intended), along with SAP’s own code, and many, many others, for my research.

PS I know that they’re called Apatosaurus now, but when I was a kiddie, the name was Brontosaurus (but if you really want a fight, try telling me Pluto isn’t a planet).

…sometimes the presenter on stage is the only one who doesn’t know what the audience is thinking – because everybody else is viewing the Twitter stream.

The PowerPoint Twitter Tools, built using SAP BusinessObjects Xcelsius, are now available.
To access these tools, download the PowerPoint templates from the SAP web 2.0 powerpoint twitter page, with usage instructions here.

These tools are prototypes and can respond slowly. However, they are easily embedded in your PowerPoint slide deck, and provide a real-time Twitter ticker feed, a Twitter feedback slide, a set of Twitter voting templates, and a Crowd Noise meter. They’re based on the SAP BusinessObjects Xcelsius dashboarding technology, but come restriction free.

Please remove SE16N, or access to SE16N, from your production systems.

UPDATE

UPDATE – This topic was the subject of a blog by Kevin Wilson less than 2 weeks ago, at which time it was discussed extensively.

https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/16008

As long as DEBUG access is very tightly controlled, your system should be protected from the risk of this transaction….

I’ve known for a while that, in some releases of SAP, transaction SE16N can be used to change SAP tables, regardless of authorisations or security settings. It’s not something I’ve been keen to see widely disseminated, as there are major systemic risks in making changes this way. More dangerously, it provides a way to override authorisations by giving your userid (or your accomplice’s userid) the SAP_ALL role.

Essentially, you run transaction SE16N, then type &SAP_EDIT into the command field and press enter.

In the example below, I’ve changed the User Group to SUPER.

Personally, I’d recommend making the transaction unavailable (perhaps even removing it from TSTC ?) in your production system – Your firefighter userid can be given authorisation to allow the appropriate people to add it back in, if necessary.

The reason for mentioning it at all is that SAP Mental Notes and IT-Toolbox SAP on DB2 for z/OS have stated that changes using this method are permanently logged in the tables listed below:
SE16N_CD_KEY : Change Documents – Header
SE16N_CD_DATA : Change Documents – Data

This means, in theory, that you can can query these tables to audit the usage of SE16N to change data. Personally, my attitude is that it’s all well and good knowing Joe Bloggs has broken your system, but I would rather not have to deal with the broken system in the first place. However, there’s a bigger issue…..

When I tested this out on an ECC6 IDES system (DB2 on Windows 2003), the SE16N_CD* tables were not updated.

1 – The knowledge of this method of changing data, which is available on production systems to anyone with access to the SE16N transaction is being more widely disseminated.
2 – There appears to be at least one major platform / release that does not support audit of the method of changing data.

Latest Free Content available from ErpTips.com:

Data Archiving: Archiving Change Documents
by Breck Whitten.

Purchasing Contracts Overview: Creation and Use
by Adam Tysman.

Tips for Integrating SAP® HCM with External Applications
by Satish Badgi.

SAP Certification: Does it Matter?
by Andy Klee, Prresident of Klee Associates, Inc., Publisher of ERPtips.

From RSSCloud.org:

In the early days of RSS, we had the idea that instantaneous updates would be the next step.

That was 2001. It took a little longer than we thought, but now with “realtime” as the Next Big Thing, it’s time to reboot all that stuff.

A week or so ago, all wordpress.com blogs became ‘cloud enabled’. At it’s most basic, this means adding an extra tag into their RSS feeds. It’s important because of new tools like Dave Winer’s River2 aggregator, that will collect your RSS feeds in real time. As opposed to waiting for your users / readers / aggregators to poll your sites.

As mentioned in Dave’s Post, you can use the new rssCloud plug-in on any Wordpress blog that you host and it adds a cloud element to your feed and handles notifications for subscribers.

So thats what I’ve done….

A basic metric for system-wide performance is up time, or system availability. Generally, this is absolute time less scheduled outages. There are many manual and automatic ways of tracking this, but one of the simplest, yet most accurate, for an SAP system is the available.log.

available.log is stored in the work directory (/usr/sap/<sid>/work). If you don’t have Operating System access, you can also view the file via transaction AL11. Find and select Directory parameter DIR_INSTANCE, then drill down into this directory….

Find the work directory and drill down again,…

… sort the resulting list of files, and availability.log should be at or near the top.

It is written by the SAP service sapstartsrv.exe. The service checks the status of the actual process list (i.e. the entries you see in the MMC SnapIn under the “Process List” node). If all processes are “green” the instance is considered to be available. Since the status information of the Dispatcher is calculated from multiple parameters (process running + connected to message server + shared memory available + good dialog queue time) the information in available.log is very reliable.

The information is checked and updated every 60 sec and at instance startup and shutdown. The default threshold for a “good” dialog time is 5.0 sec. You can adjust this threshold with the profile parameter max_dia_queue_time in the default or start profile (service must be restarted after changing it).

If the service notices that the last update to ‘available.log’ is older than 60 secs (e.g. due to computer shutdown), it will always start a new line in ‘available.log’, for example you may see:

Unavailable 30.04.2009 15:31:35 – 30.04.2009 21:28:47
Unavailable 30.04.2009 21:52:32 – 02.05.2009 08:42:39

instead of

Unavailable 30.04.2007 21:52:32 – 02.05.2007 08:42:39

Because of the time delay required to cause this situation, it is extremely likely that at least one service related to the SAP instance was not running (e.g. caused by computer shutdown).

Currently, no SAP application (that I know of !!) reads available.log – it’s just a simple log file to help measure your system availability.

Caveat: You do need to make sure that all the processes that you would see in the SAP MMC are running correctly for correct values to show in available.log. While experimenting several years ago, I had a situation where the igswd.exe service was not running correctly. I had modified the start profile, but restarted the system incorrectly. Until I did this, which reloaded my profile changes correctly, available.log was reporting that the entire SAP system was unavailable.

After my previous post, you either have your own Windows 64-bit AMI image, or access to the Public AMI I have created, called sap.nw70.win-64.db2. In this exercise, we will use this as the basis of a new, private, image that will:
* contain the appropriate installation data (including registery keys) for SAP NW7,
* be capable of online / offline backups, using SAP tools,
* provide a painless way of running 24×7.

Prerequisites

* EC2 and S3 Accounts with Amazon,
* access to a Solution Manager system (for the installation key),
* access to an OSS ID with download authorisation.

Architechture

Once we terminate an Amazon instance, we lose all changes to it. Saving our database and configuration changes by bundling the changed system into a new AMI will take a non trivial amount of time; Certainly enough to prevent it being run 24×7. Additionally we will lose lots of usefull ABAP and JAVA stack logs unless we bundle the running instance every time we shut it down.

Just as well there’s an alternative, called Elastic Block Storage. This allows you to create data volumes and mount them on your image. They are persistent, and more importantly, can be backed up by snapshots, from the AWS Management Console.

So that leads to an architechture (or rather, disk layout) as follows:

• Drive C: AMI instance, boot disk
• Drive D: AMI instance, ephemeral disk (data lost whenever instance shuts down)
• …
• Drive H: AMI instance, ephemeral disk (data lost whenever instance shuts down)
• Drive W: Persistent Disk, for storing disk-to disk backups DBMS and / or logs
• Drive X: Persistent Disk, for SAP and DB2 Intallation
• Drive Y: Persistent Disk, for DB2 logs
• Drive Z: Persistent Disk, for storing installation files

Creating EBS (Persistent) Volumes

To create EBS Volumes, go to the EBS Volumes section of the Amazon Management Console. The major issue with creating volumes is that you can only attach / mount an EBS volume on an instance that is running in the same Availability Zone. This does mean that all your volumes must be in the same Availability Zone, if they are to be attached to the same instance.

• Drive W: vol-a82bc7c1, for storing disk-to disk backups DBMS and / or logs
• Drive X: vol-3f658956, for SAP and DB2 Intallation
• Drive Y: vol-4451bc2d, for DB2 logs
• Drive Z: vol-fc2bcb95, for storing installation files

Note that these are empty, unformatted, unmounted, unattached volumes (at the moment…).

Attaching EBS Volumes to our Instance

To attach the volumes to an instance, we need to have an instance running. Start up an instance of your image or of sap.nw70.win-64.db2.

You assign a name to a volume when you are formatting it. You do this by running the Computer Management (if you’re running an instance of sap.nw70.win-64.db2, this should be on the Desktop of user sapinstall) and formatting and naming the volumes. Make the names distinctive, and related to their purpose, for example sw_repository.

Now use the C:\Program Files (x86)\Amazon\Ec2ConfigSetup\Ec2ConfigServiceSettings.exe program and the Drive Mapping tab to control which volume gets mounted to which drive letter. This is important, because we want to make sure that our sap_install, db2_logs, and backups volumes are always mounted on the same drives. Once the current image is bundled and registered, any instance launched from the new AMI will contain the setting we have configured in Ec2ConfigServiceSettings.exe.

System Specific Configuration

Change the hostname (or in Windows terms, the Computer Name) to one of your choosing (Start –> Control Panel — System –> Computer Name –> Change). Run Ec2ConfigServiceSettings.exe. and make sure the Set Computer Name flag and the Sysprep flag on the Syprep tab are disabled – They should already be disabled, if you are using a copy of sap.nw70.win-64.db2.

Check the swap space (Start –> Control Panel — System –> Advanced –> Performance Settings — Advanced, Virtual memory). Again, this should already be correctly set if you are using a copy of sap.nw70.win-64.db2.

Edit the hosts file in C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc to include your Computer Name as a valid host name, for internal SAP and DBMS connectivity.

Finally, bundle the instance using the AWS Management Console and register the resulting image under your own image name. The purpose here is to save the customisation you have done if you have a problem with the SAP installation. As part of the process of bundling, the instance is shut down and restarted.

For future reference, if you restart the instance yourself, using Start –> Shutdown and specifying Restart, you don’t loose any information or configuration from the C drive as you would if you terminated it from the AWS Management Console. This is because the later removes the underlying resources, while using Start –> Shutdown –> Restart doesn’t release the underlying resources.

Security and Firewalls

EC2 provides its own set of firewall rules called Security Groups. The defaults values are, essentially, just enough to get you access to the server itself.

Installation

Download the appropriate files from http://service.sap.com/swdc (you’ll need an S number with download authorisation), extract / expand them and store the results on the Z drive. I stored the download files under Z:\NW70SR3 and expaneded them into their own folders on the Z drive.

Make sure you read the appropriate OSS notes. For the ECC6 IDES, the important ones are:
0799639 – General IDES related
0956921 – NW7 ECC6 SR3 IDES related
1244548 – NW7 ECC6 SR3 IDES related
and
1126127 – DB6: Deferred Table Creation and Row Compression

Otherwise, the install follows the standard process, as detailed in the appropriate installation guide (in my case, the NW7.0 SR3 ABAP+JAVA / Windows/ DB2). The two exceptions are:
* Specify that the SAP and DBMS Installations go on an EBS volume (i.e drive X)
* in my case, specify that the DB2 logs go on an EBS volume (i.e. drive Y)

The full IDES install took around 30 hours run time (think of it as $20 or so well spent) from when I started sapinst (that time did include checking and amending my previous implementation notes). The majority of the time is spent loading about 150GB data into the DB2 database. However, once sapinst had accepted the Solution Manager Key, you can disconnect RDP and leave the install running.

Saving your image

Once the installation is complete, you’ll want to back it up before you go any further. Using the SAP MMC, shut down SAP (or logon to Windows as the SAPService<sid> user and shut down SAP).

Use the AWS Management Console to bundle your running instance.

Basically, the image consists of whats on the C Drive, so backing up your EBS Volumes requires you to use the AWS Management Console to save snapshots of them. The EBS volumes are stored and charged for at the Amazon S3 rates. Just like EC2, however, you are only charged fo what you use. This means that if you define a 500GB volume, write a 1 GB file to it and create 4 snapshots of the volume, you will charged for 5GB of storage; 1GB data on the volume, plus 4 lots of 1GB of snapshot. backup.

When you’re finished with the instance, shut down SAP and don’t forget to terminate tthe instance via the AWS Management Console (otherwise you’ll be charged for it !!).

Running your SAPSystem

Start an instance of your image and attach the EBS volumes to the running instance. The work of of assigning drive letters, in the correct order, to each volume is controlled by our configuration work earlier in Attaching EBS Volumes to our Instance. One of the issues currently outstanding is that thess will actually get mounted on subsequent restarts of this instance (which we perform below).

Logon to the instance and update / verify the Swap Space sttings via Start –> Control Panel — System –> Advanced –> Performance Settings — Advanced, Virtual memory.

Accessing your SAP System

Assuming you have opened the correct ports in the Security Group specified for this instance, you can now put the appropriate values into your SAP GUI …..

Whats next ?

You now have a running SAP system. However

• No DBA processing, i.e. no DB13 jobs, no backing up of logfiles etc has
  been implemented, so once you’ve tested connectivity, stop the SAP and
  DBMS systems and take snapshots of your SAP & Database volume.
• The SAP*, DDIC and IDADMIN passowrds are well known (or easily determined). Change them
• No post implementation work (i.e. SGEN) has been done,

The purpose of the exercise is to demonstrate how quickly you can run up a demonstration, training or testing system. Depending on how many resources you want to pay for (CPUs and memory), this can be quicker or slower.

However, it has been my experience, based on several green fields implementations, individual system implementations and upgrades, and feedback from others, that building an appropriate server – whether physical or virtual – can take up to 2 weeks. Using the approach detailed here, services such as provided by the Amazon EC2 service reduce this to the 45 minutes it takes to configure and bundle a standard public instance.

One of the obvious issues is that it is well and good using predefined data, which you can download, in zipped form, from OSS (such as the IDES data I used in this example). What about copying ‘real’ data fron an existing SAP system, especially if we’re talking TerraBytes ?

I’ll discuss this, the bandwidth of a portable hard disk and more of the Amazon Web Services features that are particularly useful for SAP in my next post.