Something about SAP Service Marketplace (S-user or S*user) ID

For beginners to SAP it not very clear what does it mean if we talking about S-user or S* ID. What is SAP S user ID thus? Is just a unique user ID with which you can access OSS portal page. This is what we also call as SAP Service Marketplace. Just mention briefly OSS or Marketplace is SAP portal for all its customers/partner with all the relevant information about their software, documentations, additional information, installations/patches to download etc. OSS is available with following link: service.sap.com

All links on main page marked as asterisk (*) are available only when you have such the S* ID. OSS is asking for it like following:

ID as itself has 10 digits followed by S character. There is logic behind this. I tried to put it to following bullets:

S - For customers (Licensed Customers and SAP Partners) it usually ID starts with S. Also if you obtained your S* ID via SAP certification is it most likely starts with S.

I - SAP’s internal employees (International based) are having different letter as prefix.

D - Similarly SAP internal employees based in Germany have this letter.

C - Is reserved for SAP’s contractors. Similarly if you are contractor for directly with SAP you may get S* ID starting with X.

P - Public User (P-user) on SCN. See blog here for information how to get public user.

? - I’ve have heard that platinum consultants have also some special prefix?

Here comes most important thing you might be interesting. How to get such S* ID? This depends on your condition.

If you are working for a customer/partner of SAP just ask your Service Marketplace extranet super administrator within your organization. If you do not know who is it but you know someone who has an access to Marketplace ask the guy to find out person as following: While he/she is logged into marketplace there is “Display my Super-administrators” item available in left pane under “My Portal Profile”:

Then you can ask person identified as Superadministrator to request S* ID for you.

If you are independent SAP consultant usually you get new ID on every new project that you join. If you would like to have your own ID you can get it while you undertake any of SAP certification.

There is SAP Note component dedicated to S* ID: XX-SER-SAPSMP-USR

For all the videos on topic how to handle S* ID user review following note:

1502753 - "How To" videos in the SAP Service Market Place TV Channel on YouTube

Or follow account SAPsmkp on twitter

Or see SDN wiki page: https://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/SMP/Home

- 20/07/2011 update - 
How to Add a New User in SAP Service Marketplace
How to Create a Support Message in SAP Service Marketplace

- 13/05/2014 update - 
Added different S* ID starting letters and following links:
SAP Service Marketplace FAQs and Technical Requirements
Global Support Customer Interaction - intro to SMP

- 21/08/2015 update - 

Added more different S* ID into bullets.

- 26/09/2015 update - 

Added information about P - Public user.

FindGrid – first outcome of semantic projects at SAP

Semantics as a “study of meaning” has a huge potential within business application as well. Therefore it is no wonder SAP focuses on that too. Within so called semantic business application the aim is to build application that would provide values leveraging capabilities of semantics. In principle it is about capturing and preserving any specific knowledge. You can imagine this like if you would connect brain of experts in your organization and plug it to computer to preserve this knowledge. Apparently this is not possible just we are striving for software that would help us in this way. Here comes FindGrid pilot. It support e.g. researchers within the organization while they doing analyses. They can collect information from any source; help the user in this process with automating analyzing of keywords, assign information; evaluate it etc. Application is supporting it by use cases which represent main research domains of like researches for product, market, customer analyses.

FindGrid is at the moment only code name for this project. Application is not available to all the customers yet only to the selected one which are a part of product development.

See vides available on youtube:

·         FindGrid Application Demo

·         FindGrid – Introduction

·         The story of FindGrid

·         One Minute FindGrid

SAP HANA – composite post

As I started similarly with SAP BW 7.3 I try to collect all relevant information sources about in this case SAP HANA here. BTW: What’s HANA? In short it is in-memory solution from SAP. It stands for High-Performance Analytic Appliance and basically it is appliance (plus its software components) that can absorb large volumes of data (e.g. tera bytes) into its “operational” memory. The reason why it is so high performant is that all the data is in memory not stored in hard drives. It can be set up on top of SAP ERP or BW system (plus non SAP databases) without necessity to materialize data via transformations as in contrary to current DWH solutions. HANA bundles several components: in-memory computing engine, real-time replication service, data modeling and data services. As it is delivered as appliance it is depended currently on few vendors are supported: Fujitsu, HP, IBM.

Basically we can say that HANA successor of SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator as moving forward into in-memory computing. Here HANA acts as persistence mechanism for SAP NetWeaver BW.

HANA components:

1. The core of HANA is called SAP In-Memory Computing Engine (IMCE or ICE, also called as NewDB or BAE). It is an engine kind of in memory database which uses row/column/object based database technology to store data. It is for parallel data processing using state-of-the art CPU possibilities.

2. HANA Studio (client app, or Studio Repository, Eclipse based editor connected to a HANA
Server backend) consists of:
    2.1 Administration console - administer and monitor database
    2.2 Information modeler - data modeling
    2.3 Lifecycle mngt - provides an HANA stack update using SAP Software Update Manager (SUM)


3. HANA Load Controller -resides in SAP HANA, coordinates the entire replication process: It starts the initial load of source system data to the IMDB in SAP HANA, and communicates with the Sybase Replication Server to coordinate the start of the delta replication

4. Host Agent -handles login authentication between source system and target system

5. Sybase Replication Server -accepts data from Replication Agent, distributes and applies this data to the target database using ECDA/ODBC for connectivity.

See complete typical HANA components: Implementing SAP HANA

Current versions:
SAP HANA 1.0 SP02 - as of 12th June 2011 in general availability


Operating system: //only following one:

64-bit SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 11 SP1 operating system

Upcoming version:
Nov 2011 - SAP starts rump up program for their customers to run BW on HANA as its database

Here’s list of relevant HANA information:

• ·         SDN In-memory homepage
• SAP In-memory Computing webpage
• HANA commercial homepage
• Documentation on hep.sap.com
• Documentation on CW
• 1514967 - SAP HANA 1.0: Central Note
• SAP HANA: Operational Concept (Note 1599888)
• Search for Notes in following application components:
• SAP In-Memory Database:
  • BC-DB-HDB HDB
  • BC-DB-HDB-DBA Database Administration for HDB
  • BC-DB-HDB-ENG SAP In-Memory Computing Engine
  • BC-DB-HDB-INS Installation HDB
  • BC-DB-HDB-MDX MDX Engine/Excel Client
  • BC-DB-HDB-PER Database Persistence for HDB
  • BC-DB-HDB-SYS Database Interface/DBMS for HDB
  • BC-DB-HDB-UPG Upgrade HDB
• SAP HANA:
  • BC-HAN SAP High-Performance Analytic Appliance
  • BC-HAN-LOA Load Controler
  • BC-HAN-MOD SAP High-Performance Analytic Appliance Modeler
  • BC-HAN-REP Replication Server
  • BC-HAN-UPD HANA update tool
  • BC-HAN-UPD-UI User interface for HANA update tool
• SAP BW related:
  • BW-SYS-DB-HDB BW HDB (HANA DB)
• BC-DB-HDB SAP In-Memory Database • BC-DB-HDB-ENG SAP in-memory computing engine
• phrase: "If you use BW on a SAP HANA database"
• keyword: "orange" //seems a lot of HANA related notes has this keyword// Project Orange is suppose to allow customers to run SAP NW BW on SAP HANA as database
• keyword: NewDB

• OSS quick link, OSS infopage, another one
• HANA solution discovery
• HANA solution deployment
• ·         In-Memory data management - a book by Hasso Plattner and Dr. Alexander Zeier
• SDN forum: In-Memory Business Data Management
• experiencesaphana.com HANA evangelize page
• sapinmemorycomputing.com marketing site
• sapinmemorycomputing.de marketing site, German version
• youtube video

Blogs:

• What should I do about HANA? A Summary of the ASUG Roadmap to HANA Webinar
• Some Practical Information About SAP In-Memory Solutions: BWA, BO Explorer Accelerated Version, HANA 
• The BW - HANA Relationship
• What does SAP mean by "In-Memory"?
• What is the future of Infocubes?
• SAP HANA Blogseries Part 1: What is SAP HANA and what is the "value" of SAP HANA ?
• Infocubes and Data Store Objects ... and HANA
• SAP In-memory - what is in the bag? 
• HANA's impact on ABAP Programming
• Podcast: Straight Talk about HANA with SAP
• HANA and BW 7.30 - Part 1 
• HANA and BW 7.30 - Part 2
• Finding SAP HANA Documentation  
• HANA - from Analytics Appliance to Vendor Consolidation
• You said you wanted to experience SAP HANA?
• Living in the Layers - Sikha's dispute on layers within enterprises 
• When does HANA become mainstream
• How BW-on-HANA Combines With Native HANA 
• Security Concept and Data Architecture: part 1, part 2
• Modeling Content Migration: part 1: Preparations, Security Requirements, Export; part 2: Import, Post-migration Activities
• SAP SLT (Trigger Based) Replication Made Easy: part 1: Planning, Preparation, Installation  
• SCN runs SAP (HANA)
• HANA backup script hint... a little bit more security, please!
• Using Excel on HANA
• SAP HANA Developer Access Beta program - get the best out of your test-drive! 
• Moving from BW-IP to SAP HANA optimized planning with the new Planning Applications Kit
• Data Provisioning in SAP HANA 
• Optimized in-memory planning leveraging SAP HANA  

BW-on-HANA:

• Red Bull's Migration of a BW to a BW-on-HANA System
• How does analytics look like on BW powered by HANA 

Backtrace:

• HANA backtrace 45/2011
• HANA backtrace 44/2011
  

Trainings:

• SAP In-Memory Appliance (SAP HANA 1.0) Elearning
• SAP In-Memory Appliance (SAP HANA 1.0) classroom
• HANA bundled training
• SAP HANA Training Options (via SAP Education North America)

 Webinars: 

• Overview of HANA and In-Memory road-map
• Updates on the SAP HANA Roadmap and Overall In-Memory Strategy

 Success (customer) stories: 

• SAP HANA in action (logon to sap.com/community needed)
• Corporate scale SAP Business Warehouse powered by SAP HANA 
• BASF
• Adobe
• Medidata 
• Procter & Gamble 
• Bosch and Siemens
• Nomura Research
• Centrica 
• Colgate-Palmolive 
• Hilti 
• Surgutneftegas 

 Where to practice HANA? 

• SAP Developer Center @ SDN: access to hosted HANA sandbox systems - currently beta version.
• Get the project:  be lucky enough to get into customer who is running HANA project. Unfortunately there are still only few of them.
• SAP Mentors: If you are a SAP Mentor then you have an access to SAP HANA Developer Access Beta program. It is an access to cloudshare.com where are virtual machines/images with HANA software (HANA Editor).
  

Funniest SAP notes ever 2

Better name of this post would be “isn’t this fail?”. But I leave this to consider it by reader. See following note: Note 1455155 - Code Scan comments

I’m really not quite sure what is this note about :-). There are 2 versions of this note however I cannot recognize neither any of them anything… Also notice a mix of German and English. I'm just wondering what quality assurance dept. is doing...

For first part of Funniest SAP notes ever see here.

SAP FTP servers

Might be that you have heard about it. Usually they are referred as sapservX servers. They are FTP server used to transfer files between customers and SAP. This is mainly for purposes of analyzing of customers issues. Here you as customer you can upload files with error description, traces, logs etc. Also SAP support can place some file for you as customer to fix some of your issues. X in sapservX represents the SAP FTP server accessible for you within the regions (in brackets physical location of server):

sapserv1: Internet via VPN

sapserv2:  no FTP access, only SNC saprouter
sapserv3: Europe and Africa (Walldorf)
sapserv4: America (San Francisco)
sapserv5: Japan (Tokyo)
sapserv6: Australia (Sydney)
sapserv7: Asia (Singapore)

For detail see following primary component on OSS:

XX-SER-NET-RCSC Remote Connection / Service Connection

Especially following notes as well:

40024 - Transferring customer files to sapserv# via ftp

37211 - ftp not via SAProuter : "connection refused"

1480434 - sFTP : How to upload data to SAP FTP servers

Furthermore there is a public FTP server ftp://ftp.sap.com of SAP available as well. In contrary to all above mentioned sapservX servers this one server as anonymous access FTP. Here you can download some of SAP software that is available for free. Like SAP DB software, etc. Before miniSAP and SAP GUI was located here as well.

SAP GUI overloaded

Today I somehow overloaded my SAP GUI :-) I was analyzing some data in SAP BW infocube. I extended no of returned records (in TA LISTCUBE) to some value of millions. And unfortunately cube had some many data… I didn’t realized how many records it attempted to download. Apparently there were many…

The only solution how to get out of this situation was to kill saplogon.exe process.

Difference between transactions RS12 / SM12 ?

Seems there is no difference; at least as of BW 3.0 and above. According SAP Note 316329 - Master data table locked locks on master data were handled differently in BW versions 2.0 – 2.1C. The difference is that not standard SAP lock mechanism was used but there was BW specific locking mechanism used. This was however removed in version 3.0 and subsequent. Therefore transaction RS12 is still in BW just because of BW history. As you can see the same ABAP report (RSENQRR2) is called by both TAs.

How to find BWA version?

Well, from SAP BW side not that easy :-) however everything is possible since there is a class CL_RSDDTREX_SERVICE.

For little bit more comprehensive information about SP of BW as itself you can call method COMP_BI_SP_BIA_REV.

Related posts:

How to check whether your ABAP NetWeaver is HANA DB based?

    Learn your BW in hard way

Magic of unwanted

It is really surprising and very funny those sudden moments which can be described as “magic of unwanted”. Usually it comes much unexpected. I was same case also for me this time. I was just looking on data load request in Manage table of some cube in TA RSA1. I was scrolling up and down… 

Yep, for first sight nothing is unusual there…

But if you have a closer look you just realize it… :-)

One more zoom here:

-      Update 29/04/2013 –

Sometime ago SAP BW surprised me with very data load request number which was generated in very funny way. Today I encounter similar thing. This time it was with technical ID of transformation.

Actually it might not tell you anything unless you are not Slovak speaking. This word is also familiar to Czech speaking people. Actually it is not very nice word. :-)

Receiving SAP Notes updates

OSS functionality of subscription to updates of SAP OSS Notes I already described with this post. You might wonder how such a note ”update” email look like. Emails are sent by SAP Notification Service (notification-service@sap.com) with subject SAP Support Portal Newsletter dd.mm.yyyy. There is much more within this email. You get here following information:

·         Spotlight News – the newest highlights from service.sap.com/support

·         My Inbox Items – email communication between you and SAP via SAP Service Channel Inbox

·         My SAP HotNews – Hot new according your setup via service.sap.com/hotnews

·         My SAP TopNotes – Top Notes according your filter settings via service.sap.com/topnotes

And finally:

·         My Info Subscriptions – here goes a list of notes that you subscribed for and they recently have changed, like following:

When SAP BEx will die?

-      - Update on 13/03/2019 –

It is clear now that BEx is obsolete. As BEx Analyzer front end tool as per SAP Note 2609031 is being sun setting and development part – BEx Query Designer is being replaced.

The BEx Analyzer shall be migrated to Analysis for Office and BEx Query Designer shall be migrated to Eclipse plugin– BW Modelling tools.

More info:

2609031 - Sunset of BW Business Explorer (BEx)

1322923 - Maintenance strategy / deadlines BW Business Explorer (BEx)

2095909 - BW Business Explorer (BEx) and dependencies on Microsoft Office, operating systems, and browsers

1995532 - BI 7.x tools - HW\SW requirements and Compatibility of Microsoft Operating Systems and Office Products

2333840 - BI 7.x tools in 750 - General Information & Limitations

-      - Original post - 

Might be that you got similar questions from your customers as well. SAP is replacing its BEx portfolio with BusinessObjects. What shall we do? Start to look for new BW front end? Try to still to BEx as long as possible? Can we live without support from its producer? In case we should switch to other tool, what tool to pick up?

In this post I just try to focus on topic of how long SAP is going to maintain BEx releases. In particular we need to distinguish between developing of new BEx version and its maintenance.

In case of 2nd question related to BEx version maintenance we have nice SAP note 1322923 - Maintenance strategy / deadlines BW Business Explorer (BEx) which answers this. SAP is maintaining BEx per different operation systems (OS). For those OSs which are not supported by their vendor; SAP stops maintenance as well. This date is called de-support date. After expiration of OS manufacturer support SAP is checking compatibility of BEx patches for approximately 1 year. This is called post mortem QA procedure. Just to highlight most used OSs:

Windows XP Professional:

De-Support: March 31, 2014

          Post mortem QA: until December 31, 2014

Windows 7:

De-Support: January 13, 2015

          Post mortem QA: January 14, 2020

In case of 1^st question developing of new BEx versions we can refer above mentioned SAP Note as well. It is said in there that within the upcoming versions of SAP GUI (currently under the shipment phase is version 7.3) there will be new versions of BEx as well. We all know how it is with SAP Notes. They all get updated from time to time. I would not be surprised if there will be no such a sentence in future in this note. Therefore we need some other more less “official” SAP sources related to this topic. According SDN’s Bex homepage; quote: “BEx is continuing being delivered within next SAP NW BW and currently there is no is no planned end of life”.

Whatever SAP has ever said days of BEx are not that bright as it would be seen. BusinessObjects portfolio is proffered by SAP. This might be experienced while you would be talked to SAP accounts managers. I have also seen projects where customer was assessing several BI frontend tools and SAP applied only with BusinessObjects and not with BEx. Of course that non SAP BusinessObjects has won.

However you perceive this topic I would say that SAP BEx will be with us for some time and there is no hurry to replace it in midterm perspective.

To see for how long your version of SAP GUI will be supported see following post:

When your SAP GUI will die?