How to prepare for start /stop of SAP BW system

A quiet while ago I posted blog about BW specific report RS_SYSTEM_SHUTDOWN to be used to shut down and start up BW processes. Actually I think SAP Basis people will agree that a topic of starting/stopping of BW system is bit more complex.

For restarting of the BW system SAP recommends to perform so called soft shutdown (sometimes called graceful shutdown). This means that while shutdown is triggered it waits for transactions to be completed instead just hard shutdown. The some waiting times can be configured via profile parameters to assign them specific time out. See more about these parameters here.

Here are points to consider from the BW system perspective while the soft shutdown is going on.

- Process chain related processes/jobs

- Real time data acquisition daemons (RDS) jobs

In case of PCs I there are these active it just continue to run during the wait time that was given in report RS_SYSTEM_SHUTDOWN on its selection screen. No new background processes (like process chains) are started by scheduler. If there are some of the PCs waiting for execution they will be executed after the restart.

In case of RDS jobs during the soft shutdown are terminated but without stopping the daemons or closing open requests. Successor jobs for the RDS are scheduled using immediate start.

There are also other tools that can be used in case soft shutdown is not an option. For (let's call it) “hard” shutdown there is an ABAP report BTCTRNS1 (no new jobs are started during the shutdown) for “hard” restart report BTCTRNS2 (jobs are scheduled back after the restart and are started as well.

More information:

Online docu: SAP BW Basic Administration Task