Learning from SLT to Oracle Implementation

[former_member182537]

SLT as we know is one of demanding middleware technlogies today which can be very useful, though normally roadmap for SLT is HANA but in our case it was decided to use Oracle as target system and SAP ECC as the source. From SLT SP009 - it started supporting Oracle as target as well. Here is quick overview on few learnings -

Data Flow :

SAP ECC ->SLT- >Oracle DB

For SLT SP009 - SAP gave few correction Notes which are sugggested to implement before working as it will fix lot of issues.

2175207, 2181180, 2189884, 2200105, 2204961, 2210900,2212421,2217198,2221240,2222454,2226947,2230969

1) Sizing of Oracle DB Target -Memory size of Oracle DB need to be estimated correctly else often the issue occured where oracle system memory was full becaue of volume of data flowing from SAP ECC.Hence we needed to increase the memory size of Oracle to fix this issue and hence in longer term need to estimate size growth and accrodingly take actions.

2) Stats for Initial Load in SLT-  For number of tables it was observed that initial loading stats information in LTRC T code was misisng and this was fixed when SAP suggested to apply SAP Notes but the same issue appeared again when we were loading other tables then SAP said this will be taken up in further release as this was major change. The Notes listed above should help though we have to wait for SAP next release for final fix.

3) Timestamp field Oracle requirement- There was requirement to add Timestamp field to tables in SLT, and send across data to Oracle in Oracle Time stamp format.This was acheived by passing hard coded value from SLT(LTRS  Mapping values tab setting) in Oracle time format ,though the timestamp generation in SLT was possible but while updating to Oracle the data type changed to VarChar2 which was not required as the requirement was to have TIMESTAMP data type of Oracle due to performance issue.

Hence this was only possisble in Oracle system by writing trigger script which will overwrite hard code Timestamp coming from SLT with Oracle System Timestamp for any data records updated to tables.

4)Language Text Issue- Certain Russian language characters were reported as question mark ? in Oracle as system could not recognize and hence to fix this Oracle was upgraded to have multi Lingual capability. Post that this was rectified.

Hope above helps & I will add few more to this list as we face any other issues.

Thanks,

Nilesh

[Ashutoshshukla]

Hi,

Good post , I have requirement to replicate SAP ECC on HANA to IBM NETEZZA.

Is it also supported by SLT SP009.

[former_member182537]

hi,

max DB, DB2 ,DB4,DB6,, MSSQL,ORACLE, Sybase ASE, HANA are supported DB for SLT for Non SAP.

[Ashutoshshukla]

Ok Thanks.

I am exploring ODBC Connection option Now.

[former_member182537]

ok let us know your issues/learnings as well

[former_member183251]

Hi Nilesh,

Quick question for you.

DId you have any issues converting NUMC sap format to oracle (it converts it to VARCHAR2 in Oracle).  Same for a DATS sap format.

I tried to overwrite it in table IUUC_REPL_TYPMAP but it doesn't do anything... did you have a similar issue?

Thanks,

Pawel

[former_member182537]

Hi Pawel , In our case we had specific requirement linked to Oracle time stamp only.

however there is mapping value tab in Ltrc where you can map default type of oracle whatever you need and try once.

let me know if this work  in our case we had to explicit hardcode oracle timestamp in mapping value tab and then overwriting this in oracle via script.

let me know outcome once.

[former_member183251]

HI Nilesh,

I think what you meant is LTRS, not LTRC. 

I can define a new field in LTRS for a table I want to replicate, but even then, even if I set that field to be of type NUMC or DATS, once it gets replicated to Oracle, it becomes a Varchar. 

I have no idea how to change that mapping, or if it's even possible to do it.

Pawel

[former_member182537]

HI Pawel, Yes it was LTRS. please see attached image thta might help here in table strcure we have defined ztime field as CHAR but as in below we are overwriting it with TIME STAMP data type of oracle

so you can also give your field name as per table append in SLT , so for exp

ZTIME you have added as NUMC then

ZTIME  "ZTIME" XXXX

where XXXX is data type from oracle what you need

[former_member183251]

Ni Nilesh,

I dont have that tab (Mapping Values). 

Is there something I need to do to activate it in some way?  I only have tabs Table Settings and Table structure...

[former_member182537]

check your SP level.My was SLT SP009

Older SP also might have that in some other way - maintaining the tables which will override have you tried ?

[former_member183251]

Mine is SLT SP008. 

I think this section appears when the target system is SAP HANA, at least according to SAP help:

Mapping Values

Note: This section is only relevant if you are replicating data to an SAP HANA target system.

My guess is the table behind is IUUC_REPL_TYPMAP but it doesn't do any difference for me.  I did try to fill it and I get the same result : NVARCHAR in Oracle.

THanks for all your help, very appreciated.

Pawel

[former_member182537]

Mine is though non SAP target so SLT started supporting this from SP009 hence probbaly that is making difference.

You can try raise OSS to SAP ans see if that helps.

Nilesh

[former_member183515]

Hi Nilesh

Thank you for sharing your experiences. I am currently working on a very similar scenario and have to get data from ECC to Oracle system. Were you able to replicate BSEG or any other pooled table without any issue? I mean if you have to do something extra for that.

Also, can you generate output as delimited files from SLT? We have a very fragmented architecture with strict policies and need to feed various systems with similar data from ECC.

[former_member182537]

Hi Nishu, thanks. Yes we were able to replicate bseg cluster tables which normally takes more time as compared to other tables..for this you have to amend some settings in LTRs t code to use read mode type as 4 and allow enough time for calculation job to run in ecc as this will take long time depending on number of records in ecc And for initial load of big tables assign 6-7 parallel loads depending on your config setting.

you also have option to split loads year wise for beg in LTRs depending on requirement. Hope this helps.

not sure of output in file format as slt is middleware , so are you looking for output in this format from oracle ?.

once you send data to oracle there are options to pull data into file format via data pump etc

[former_member183515]

Thank you Nilesh for your response. Great tips - should include them in your blog. Did you replicate any DataSources too - standard or generic?

Regarding files, I understand that SLT is a middleware but was wondering that if we can leverage ABAP coding to generate files from SLT and save on a dedicated file server. From here on, other systems can pick and consume these files which in my case is one of the options. Definitely, the other option is to generate using Oracle or ECC.

[former_member182537]

HI nishu, no we loaded just from tables directly in erp to oracle. In our case data sources were not used..

but but data sources both standard and generic can be used for slt with odp scenario in bw in case you plan to use bw in your design.

regards

[fernando_manzo]

Hi Nilesh,

thanks for your great post, hope you can help us on this one...

We were able to do the same configuration in our systems. Also, with field rule assignment and with the help on the include functionity and abap code, we change the timestamp data to match Oracle expected format. I mean, we change the order of the timestamp data from YYYYMMDDH24MISSFFFFFF  (SAP Hana format) to be DD/MM/YYYY H24:MI:SSXFFFFFF (Oracle format). So far, so good....

But for some reason SLT is sending the data in HANA format even we already change it to Oracle with the help of field event rule in ltrs

Question 1: Is there a way to prevent this ? We have fixed doing a "trigger at logon" in Oracle to change timestamp format to match SAP format but this is just not right, SLT should send the data we change already in the rule assignment.

Question 2: we also catch nulls from source hana system to be replaced as '' (empty string). Please note that if we try to insert an empty string in Oracle does not fail at all, but sending '' in a timestamp field from slt cause to fail. It seems data is sent from slt inside a "to_timestamp" casting and that could explain both of our issues.  Is there a way to prevent this ?

Please note that we cannot change timestamp type field in Oracle as this same table is currently used for several applications, so we need to replicate data without changing field data types in the target db.

Thanks a lot for your valuable contributions!

Fernando.