How PG&E implemented SAP BI-A and did performance tuning

How PG&E implemented SAP BI-A and did performance tuning Darin Lemos PG&E Bjarne Berg Director SAP BI Comerit Inc.

Learning Points • See a practical example from PG&E and understand what you can expect on your implementation • Learn how BI-A works • Explore benefits and limitations of the tool

Agenda Introduction Pacific Gas & Electric Project Overview What is SAP BI-A Overview Building aggregates Benefits How we implemented BI-A Sizing the environment Team organization and project plan Testing BI-A Limitations PG&E - Our top-10 Lessons Learned Wrap-up

In this session. • We will look what SAP NetWeaver BI Accelerator can—and cannot—do to optimize dashboard performance. • Explore how we PG&E planned, and implemented SAP NetWeaver BI Accelerator. • Examine performance benchmarks for SAP NetWeaver BI Accelerator • Explore the top 10 lessons learned from the project team and see a sample work plan and an organization chart from this project as a reference for your own SAP NetWeaver BI Accelerator initiative…

Agenda Introduction Pacific Gas & Electric Project Overview What is SAP BI-A Overview Building aggregates Benefits How we implemented BI-A Sizing the environment Team organization and project plan Testing BI-A Limitations PG&E - Our top-10 Lessons Learned Other Query Performance tricks Wrap-up

PG&E Company Overview • Pacific Gas and Electric Company, incorporated in California in 1905, is one of the largest combination natural gas and electric utilities in the United States. • There are approximately 20,000 employees who carry provide natural gas and electric service to 15 million people throughout a 70,000-square-mile service area in northern and central California.

PG&E Company Overview • SAP since 1996 • Currently on SAP ERP 4.72, upgrade to ECC 6.0 in 2009 • 8,500 users for all back office and field operations –Finance/Controlling –HR Org/Benefits/Personnel/Payroll –Employee Self Service: 20,000 employees; 18,000 retirees –Manager Self Service –Supply Chain Management --Materials Management & Supplier Relationship Management –Equipment/Work Order Management in Plant Maintenance –Business Warehouse • First major go live was a 50,000 person day project in October 2007

PG&E SAP Project Overview • Detailed Design Phase • Design the foundation for the deployment of new processes and tools • Design SAP customizations • Design training and performance support • Roadmap Phase • Vision and Strategy • “To-be” business capabilities • Build business case for change Feb 05 – Oct 05 Aug 04 - Nov 04 Nov 05 – Sep 06 Oct 06 – • Design Phase • Design Level 1 and Level 2 processes • Application architecture • Design “To be” organization to enable future business processes and technology • Foundational Release: Build, Test, and Deployment Phases • Build Customizations • Build Procedures and Training • Convert master and transactional data • Assembly Test • Product Test • Deployment

PG&E Project Scope - EAM WRM

PG&E Project - Scope and Modules

PG&E Project Benefits

PG&E Project BW and History - Performance Needs Delivering High Performance Analytics to a potential user community of 8,500 users requires special considerations for design, technical architecture and hardware. I the spring of 2008, PG&E therefore started an examination of BI-A as potential tool for increasing performance of the financial dashboards in SAP BI. The scope of this effort was primarily finance, but the benefits were also intended to benefit a larger user community.

Why BI-A? Disk speed is growing slower than other HW components Architectural Drivers Technology Drivers 1990 2009 Improvement 1990 2009 Disk based data storage Simple consumption of apps (Fat client UI, EDI) General-purpose, application-agnostic database In-memory data stores Multi-channel UI, high event volume, cross industry value chains Application-aware and intelligent data management 0.05 MIPS/$ 8.30 MIPS/$ 166x CPU 0.02 MB/$ 8.51 MB/$ 425x Memory 216 264 248x Addressable Memory 100 Mbps 10 Gbps 100 x Network Speed 5 MBPS 400 MBPS 80x Source: 1990 numbers SAP AG 2009 numbers Dr. Berg Disk Data Transfer Physical hard drive speeds only grew by 80 times since 1990. All other hardware components grew faster.

BI Accelerator Works by Indexing InfoCubes in Hardware memory BI Accelerator has been simple to install and operate for established SAP BI teams You use process chains to maintain the BI-A engine after each data load SAP BW Any tool IBM, Sun, HP & Fujitsu have standard solutions ranging from $32K to $300K+ that can be installed and tested in as little as 2-4 weeks (+ SAP license fees) 32 GB Blades are certified by SAP

BI Analytical Engine’s Query executing priorities Query ExecutionWithout BI Accelerator Query ExecutionWith BI Accelerator Information Broadcasting /Precalculation Information Broadcasting /Precalculation Query Cache Query Cache Aggregates SAP NetWeaver BI Accelerator InfoProvider Aggregates can be replaced with BI-A, while the memory cache is still useful.

Performance is Near-Linear: Benchmarks BIA’s strength resides in its near-linear scalability Performance is measured in terms of: BI-A index creation time Multi-user throughput per hour Average report response time Average number of records touched by each report BIA Currently reads data from InfoCubes. DSOs & InfoObjects are still read from base/physical tables (even when the InfoObject is indexed as part of master data).

Most customers have found BIA Admin to be minimal The training & admin to run BI Accelerator has proven to be minimal. Training is included in the SAP courses: BW310, BW360 and in the online course BW361 Many companies, have spent 2-5 days in BIA training (total for 1-2 administrators) and a work through a single interface: RSDDBIAMON (Checks available at: RSRV) In the past, SAP has also offered a 2 day workshop called “BI Upgrade & Accelerator” (WNABIA)

Sizing was critical, but good tools were available to help SAP has integrated key sizing parameters for BIA in the new QuickSizer. You can give it a try at:http://service.sap.com/quicksizer Customer with existing BI systems and data loaded can get good sizing estimates by running the SAP program available in SAP Note: 917803

Some Hardware options we looked at Operating Systems and StorageSUSE Linux 64-bit, Intel basedMemory based and file storage (no database for Accelerator)Available Hardware PlatformsHP (HP ProLiant and HP StorageWorks)IBM (IBM Blade Center and IBM Total Storage)FujitsuSiemens (FSC Blade Server and EMC Storage)SUN Microsystems (SUN Blade Server and StorageTek) The hardware implementation is done by the vendors. Be prepared for lead times on delivery of large systems (Made-to-Order is common).

PG&E - Our Initial Hardware sizing (July 2008) We found that the BIA should be sized for critical applications. Most companies use BIA only for Production, while others have a complete landscape

PG&E - Our Query Performance Improvments The slowest queries that spent most of their time on the database side benefited the most Overall 36 of 70 queries were at least twice as fast….

PG&E - Our Query Performance Improvments 58 of 70 queries were at least 50% faster Before BIA the average query execution took 58.8 seconds, after BIA the average query took 17.9 seconds (295% faster).

PG&E - Query Performance Improvments OVERALL Number of Queries The major improvement was to make query execution more predictable and overall faster Seconds Number of Queries Seconds

PG&E - Workbook Performance Improvments with BIA Average performance improvement for workbooks was 363% faster

Performance Info – PG&E BI-A Indexes build times 232,298,392 records in 23 infocubes were indexed in 90.56 minutes. On average we were able to build indexes on 2.56 million records per minute

Team organization at PG&E We had a small team of 3 people dedicated to the BIA project supported by one basis person, and the rest of the BW team Hardware team supported by the vendor was also involved in a part-time capacity. Overall the effort was combined with a performance tuning project that also included building of aggregates, caching and query redesigns.

PG&E - Testing • We had testers and requirements gathered from the finance community. The goal was at least 50% faster on the 38 web dashboards. • We achieved: • 363% faster for workbooks on average • 70% faster for queries on average • 58 of 70 queries were at least 50% faster • Index builds took about 1.5 hrs

PG&E - Top 10 Lessons Learned Plan to order hardware early - lead times can be long Make sure you have a committed project sponsor Create benchmarks for workbooks, queries and cockpits to document success Update to latest service pack Involve your basis team and environment management team early

PG&E - Top 10 Lessons Learned Be realistic, not all queries will benefit equally from SAP BIA Plan for testing and gradual rollout of BIA to key users Make sure failovers and spare blades are part of your hardware sizing Create a small dedicated team with access to external expertise as needed Perform query tuning and potential redesign as part of a larger system performance tuning effort.

How does it work in reality?? Currently, the BIA performs aggregation and data selection for the query, all other processing is done by the OLAP analytical engine. Not all query processing will be dramatically faster… In the next SAP NetWeaver release the BIA will handle more of the analytics processing such as “top-5 products sales” which is currently done in the OLAP analytical engine. SAP BIA is not used when the result set exceeds 3 million records (max. default). When the result set is less, the data is sent as one large data package to the application server (need fast network).

BIA is becoming mainstream Some of SAP reference clients BIA is no longer something exotic. Many of the large BI systems have already implemented BIA and many more projects are under way in Europe and in the Americas. Once you exceed a few hundred critical users and/or 3-4 TB of data you should seriously consider SAP BIA

The Future SAP BI-A RoadMap 2009/2010 Prior to 2008 2008 • Optimized BusinessObjects Webl integration on top of SAP NetWeaver BI/BIA • BusinessObjects Polestar integration: Self-Service BI based on search paradigm SAP NetWeaver BI Accel-erator • Accelerator for InfoCube Read Times • Low Cost of Operations • High Availability / Backup & Recovery • Analytic Capabilities (e.g. top n) • DataStore Object Acceleration • Standalone BIA for source-independent acceleration via Business Objects • Agile BI: Local and source-independent innovation space for departments

Agenda Introduction Pacific Gas & Electric Project Overview What is SAP BI-A Overview Building aggregates Benefits How we implemented BI-A Sizing the environment Team organization and project plan Testing BI-A Limitations PG&E - Our top-10 Lessons Learned Wrap-up Question and Answers

Key Learnings BI-A is a useful tool for performance tuning, but it is not a ‘solve-all’ solution for poorly made queries It was easy to implement (very quick) Look at how your queries are executing (i.e. database or application server usage) when estimating benefits of implementing BI-A Once you exceed a few hundred critical users and/or 3-4 TB of data you should seriously consider SAP BIA The administration of BI-A is simple and anyone can learn it in a few days Plan on waiting for hardware, we found that most was made-to-order Make sure you have redundancies and check that what you order is what got shipped.

Dr. Bjarne Berg's web page -- 85+ presentations, tutorials & articles http://csc-studentweb.lrc.edu/swp/Berg/BB_index_main.htm Large scale testing of SAP BI Accelerator on a NetWeaver Platform https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/go/portal/prtroot/docs/library/uuid/b00e7bb5-3add-2a10-3890-e8582df5c70f Resources

Questions and Answers How to contact us: Dr. Bjarne Berg Darin Lemos bberg@comerit.net D4JLY@pge.com

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How PG&E implemented SAP BI-A and did performance tuning