What is "netweaver"

I recently started a new job. As part of my first assignments I was asked to participate in the "installation of netweaver". and I was puzzled. Very puzzled in fact, because in my mind the first netweavers were released in 2004. And I was certain the company wasn't THAT far behind in their release strategy.

So I googled "netweaver", and I looked at my result list. Apparently, the "what is netweaver" is very high on the list of results. So I summized that many people who do not work with SAP daily, might not know what netweaver is. So to avoid further confusion, I created a powerpoint presentation explaining what netweaver is.

From SAPs perspective it's presented as such:

In this picture, the Application Platform is the ABAP and JAVA stack systems that are usually a part of the business suite systems, the Process Integration is the PI system (more or less), Information Integration is a slew of systems and technologies to present stored data differently, like BI, TREX etc. And the People Integration is all of the "user generated data" technology, like mobility, portal etc.

The original idea from SAP was to create a technology in which you could seamlessly move data between systems, SAP or not. Not unlike what was later released as the XI (now PI) system. But in reality, the entire business suite is today a part of the netweaver concept. Anything newer than 4.7 will be "netweaver enabled".
If you think of the SAP business suite as an office pack, where ERP, SRM etc. are the products (like word excel etc) then netweaver will be the API/ language you use to communicate between the products. External tools can also do this, most frequently you will find people describing .NET and websphere as such tools, but in reality many tools exists that supports the netweaver integration.

It ended up with one of my colleagues handing me the installation guide for the software they were talking about. It was from "Netweaver Application Server Java 7.3".... So the confusion was apparently caused by SAP using one of their buzzwords just a slight bit too much.... Again :D

MSSQL error 14262 on a SAP CCMS job

I got some weird calls on this error in my system log on several SAP systems:

BY  2 Database error 14262 at EXE
BY  0 > [Microsoft][SQL Native Client][SQL Server]The specified
BY  0 > @job_name ('SAP CCMS Check Database XXX
BY  0 > [20120102153140-6-060000]') does not exist.

Everything worked, so noone really bothered to fix the problem, untill it started to wake up too many people at really odd hours (one of those people being me who likes to sleep at night), so I decided to investigate....
After searching a lot, and talking to a lot of people I found out that apparently this job is run as a part of the DBchecks that DBAcockpit needs to do, one of the DBCC jobs. The downside seems to be that a new job is scheduled every once in a while (at least once a year until you implement a fix for the ccms_check_db_hist_YYYY.txt file issue), and the old jobs doesn't seem to "go away" from MSSQL even though the job has been deleted from within SAP.

so I investigated a little bit, and SAP has a solution in note 1413688. But starting to create and run huge scripts on our databases seems like a very poorly thought out solution to what clearly must be a simple problem (namely that the job isn't deleted correctly).
So I went in search of the cause of the error. In MSSQL server management, I did find a lot of interesting jobs:



Lo and behold. There was a job that matched my error, as I expected. Now, the job was disabled (by our very competent sysadmin who also created a nice, shiny new job that did all the work it was supposed to do, which is why everyone ignored the error), so I was wondering why the old job showed up in my system log, but more interesting was, why didn't the other disabled jobs do the same ?
After a cursory examination of the jobs on a few systems with the same problem, I found a commonality: Apparently the job owner(s) was set as a user that didn't have ora_dba privileges (!)
So I changed the owner in the job properties, and hey presto, problem gone....







Now I completely understand that ideally, the jobs shouldn't even be checked from within SAP, and of course they should be deleted from the DB when they're deleted within SAP, but this way fixed my problem in a hurry, and without invoking any huge alterations in my system, so I was happy. Today I'll enjoy some nice weather, and I'll spend another day wondering who changes the ownership of a running database, because I know that question will make me quite unhappy...

automating SAP/Oracle backups on windows systems

The other day I was looking at a windows/Oracle flavor that had to get a new backup system up and running.
While I normally wouldn't want to run Oracle on windows, I nevertheless had no choice in the matter here.

So my first step would be to ensure that I dont start a backup if one is already running. On a unix system I'd have to either create a lockfile that tells me that the backup is running, or I'd have to do some serious grep'ing in the processlist, because one thing unix is good at is running a lot of databases on one huge server. Unfortunately, windows isn't very good at that. So I decided to use that in my favor.
I noticed that each system only had one database instance. Which meant that I could simply look for the presence of my executable in the tasklist, and skip all of my steps if I "got lucky".... (ok, so I really should return an error message somewhere, but I'll fix that later). With brbackup it got as simple as this:

REM first determine if a backup is running - I shouldn't run a backup if it is already started.....
tasklist /FI "IMAGENAME eq brbackup.exe">NUL | find /I /N "brbackup.exe">NUL
if %ERRORLEVEL%==0 goto :errormsg
REM if we reach this point program brbackup.exe is not running and we can continue

And now I'm off to figure out how to implement the "/ as sysdba" privilege when my script is being called by a service. Because services are definitely one thing windows excels at being bad at ;)

Sometimes windows is a funny thing

Once in a while I run across a few oddities, I think most of us do, in my daily tasks. One of them was this one....
A filesystem with the SAP workfiles was full, and I had to do some cleanup to get things going. Just deleting the recyclebin didn't really cut it, so I had to deelte some files.
Going to the workdir and selecting the oldest files, will usually net me a couple of outdated files I can delete, so I tried to delete these and got this funny error from windows:

  

Apparently I need to delete some files in order to be able to delete files ;)

Fortunately the fix is easy, the error actually means that I cannot send the files selected to the recyclebin. So simply clicking shift+delete will work.

Meanwhile I'm still working on some automated cleanup tasks.... It would seem there's still systems around here that need it. And now I have even more reason to laugh at Microsofts error messages....

finding contents of hidden unix files

I've never really gotten the hang of which environment file contains what when fixing environment variables on a unix system. Well, I do know, I just spend way too much time doing this stuff, because there's always a lot of places I miss.

So while I normally can simply grep for the contents of a file, grepping for the contents of a hidden file, however, is slightly more tricky. Selecting .* doen't really seem to cut it with the find or grep commands. Luckily I found a way to cheat it.....

grep 'string' ./.*

This cheats grep into searching the local directory . for files of type .*
So now I can just grep for my variablename and find all occurances in the profile files without actually having to think about it.....

selecting objects in DB2 with a slash in them

Not having worked with DB2 for a while, I found myself in a bind today.
One of the developers had tried installing a package from somewhere, and it created a lot of objects with slashes in them. Like /DEV1/WEIRD_OBJECT and /DEV/WEIRD_OBJECT_V

After an attemt at uninstalling these I was asked to help. And I was kind of puzzled at first about why someone would use a command interpreted character in an objectname. But overcomming this obstacle was nonetheless my task. A simple command db2 "drop table tablename" didn't really do the trick. Looking at the manual just gave me todays first headache. Searching with bing and google returned no viable results, other than a lot of critism about using slashes in objectnames and some helpful hints for Oracle. Had this been oracle, the problem would have been much simpler. Just use double quotations.

I didn't have this option in DB2, because I have to send the command in the double quatation to begin with !

In the end I ended up using single AND double quotations like: db2 "select viewschema,viewname from syscat.views where viewname like '/DEV1/WEIRD%' "
That gave me a nice overview of the views (you can guess the command to view the tables :D ) and then it's just rinse and repeat for the drop commands.....

Headache is still here, but now at least the problem is gone....

Altering SQL procedures in an SAP system

The other day I was stupified by a note from SAP. I had an SQL error 8115

SQL 8.115: [Microsoft][SQL Server Native Client 10.0][SQL server]
Arithmetic overflow error converting numeric to data type varchar.
This was caused by dbacockpit. And I even found a nice note about it, number 1638567, which states that I just had to be on a certain release level (and lets face it, who is ?), but if all else fails, I could just go to transaction SE38 and fix it in the report MSSPROCS.

Now the problem was the this report no longer showed me the MSSQL procedures (!)

But I found that it was still possible to change the procuderes by going to transaction DB02, and expanding the "configuration" view. Under here there's a menuitem "SQL Script Maintenance". Here I found the script I needed "sap_dbcc_opentran", and just pressed change. Voila. 

There was the magic number that I needed to change. And presto.... Gone was the error.
It's still weird though, that SAP doesn't update their notes with relevant information about how to implement their changes. Espcially, if they remove previously available options.