IQ

So a quick blast on the blog. I've been hearing HANA, HANA, HANA all the time in the last year. It's a new-wave technology - totally in-memory database computing using the columnar database paradigm. Powerful stuff - for analytical dbs it's amazing tech - querying millions of rows in seconds.

However

When SAP purchsed Sybase they acquired not only the unwired platform (SUP)... and not only ASE (their RDBMS)... but also Sybase IQ - a columnar analytical database...
http://www.sybase.co.uk/products/datawarehousing/sybaseiq?htab=Overview&vtab=Latest+Release&hid=79917&vid=84316

Rumours I hear suggest it could be better than HANA in some situations. How will SAP proceed? It's interesting stuff. At least to me.

By the way of anyone knows where I can get academic literature on columnar databases please FW details to doonan_79@hotmail.com.

Cheers all - over and out.

SAP NetWeaver 7.1x - Why?

OK quite a strange title - but I've just spent a day delving into exactly what SAP NetWeaver 7.1x is. It's not a full NetWeaver release. They are 7.00/7.01 and then 7.3 - this is a release only for specific usage types - e.g. NetWeaver CE (Composition environment) 7.10 or NetWeaver PI (Process Integration) 7.10.

But why only release a version that's for specific Usage Types? I'm sure there's a perfectly reasonable answer but it still winds me up a little.

So for context - I was looking at SAP Redwood CPS ( http://www.redwood.com/solutions/business/sap-central-process-scheduling/ ) and it's listed as compatible, currently, with SAP NW 7.00, SAP NW 7.01 (7 + EHP1), SAP NW PI 7.10 and SAP NW PI 7.11. This seems quite quite strange as I don't believe from reading materials on SAP and Redwood CPS that it requires an ABAP stack... yet for PI you'll get a dual stack - you'd need something like a SAP CE 7.10/7.11 installation for a standalone Java stack..... hmmm.. for now I'm looking to SAP NetWeaver 7.01 AS Java for a CPS platform - unless the documentation is updated or they release CPS fro SAP NetWeaver 7.30

SNMP

SNMP - Simple Network Management Protocol

I hadn't realised how widespread this had become as a protocol used by applications all over the IT industry. Recently found working with SAP and Redwood tools that they all rely heavily on this protocol.

As it's so critical what body oversees it's integrity?

Turns out it's
"..a component of the Internet Protocol Suite as defined by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It consists of a set of standards for network management, including an application layer protocol, a database schema, and a set of data objects."- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Network_Management_Protocol

I highly recommend to those in the industy a quick visit to the IETF site to stay abreast of what's going on. Currently their next big meeting is in Taipei, Taiwan in November.
http://www.ietf.org/

What's a NUMA?

While working with SAP and ORACLE on HPUX systems in recent years I've had to configure many a "NUMA" related parameter - well who hasn't these days?

So that I don't have to pretend to my wife that I know what that is I think I should probably find out and blog it here (as actually she doesn't care... of course)

I attended a good webconf today on tuning memory in HPUX systems. They mentioned NUMA architecture and tuning shared memory vs CLM - or Cell-Local-Memory, which is essentially memory local to the processor (in a multi-processor server, or servers).

And that's where NUMA is the paradigm - it stands for Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) and covers the design of systems with both memory that is locally assigned to processors and shared or interleaved memory that is shared between processors.

I won't go into much detail on L2, L3 and L4 caches as I cannot talk with great authority and I'm sure Google can well you... for a start though if it interests you checkout the NUMA entry in Wikipedia.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Uniform_Memory_Access

Multiple ORACLE installations - "make" errors

If you are running multiple installations on one server and you get make errors similar to below:

Unable to find make file: /oracle//102_64/network/lib/ins_net_client.mk
etc
SEVERE:OUI-10105:Some of the configuration assistants failed. However these are optional assistants, so they are not required for the correct configurati
on of your system. If you want to try to run those assistants again, select the failed assistants and click the 'Retry' button.

Then the fix is simple. You may, like I was, be using a single oraInventory location, which inventories details of installations. However if you manually uninstall or muck it around at all it's going to get very unhappy.
The the very least I suggest editing it for each installation to have a separate directory.
For example instead of just using /oracle/oraInventory for six db SIDs, use
/oracle/oraInventory/SID1dir
/oracle/oraInventory/SID2dir
/oracle/oraInventory/SID3dir
/oracle/oraInventory/SID4dir

Note the inventory location is set in /var/opt/oracle/oraInst.loc

For SAP ORACLE installations see SAP note: 350251

Abobe Captivate, SAP Tutor and WMV Converters

Looking at developing training with Adobe Captivate (AC) and/or SAP Tutor (ST).

Initially I thought I would embed ST files in a AC training course, as I was advised AC was a well liked tool for developing training at my company and it did seem quite swish. ST is pretty cool for recording interactive training from SAP systems so you can train people without any actual SAP access; however I soon found that I could record the same thing just using AC.

You can record "Full Motion" on the screen from AC, but the rate isn't great when I tested it and I'm not sure how you create it as an overlapping or embedded part of training - it doesn't seem that you can.
My webcam software records only WMV files by default so now I'm looking for a good solution to convert WMV files into a readable format. At home I use Cucusoft but I'm looking for an approved tool at work.
Ah-ha. An answer. You can use many things I'm sure, but I found that I could install and utilise Adobe "Media Encoder" to convert the WMV file into a Flash (f4v) video file.

Once this was done I was able to embed this video within training slides in AC.

It looks like you can create a very re-usable piece of training with access to a SAP training system, Adobe Captivate, Adobe Media Encoder, a decent webcam and a lot of patience. I'll report back again in future to note how this goes...