Bulletin of the Ieee Computer Society Technical Committee on Data Engineering

SAP R/3 is the most successful product for enterprise resource planning (ERP). It is used by most Fortune 500 companies and comprises modules for human resource management, accounting, logistics, etc. Like many other application systems, SAP R/3 is based on a commercial relational database system which is used to store all R/3 related data; e.g., a company’s sales information. When installing R/3, it is possible to choose among several commercial systems; e.g., Adabas D, IBM UDB, Informix Adaptive Server, Microsoft SQL Server, or Oracle 8. Obviously, very good performance is crucial for users of SAP R/3. In many companies, transactions of thousands of users must be processed concurrently by SAP R/3 and the underlying database system. In addition, the size of the database can become very large. Today, the largest SAP R/3 databases have about 1.5 terabytes; in a few years, these databases are likely to grow several times that size as a result of new R/3 releases and developments; e.g., component architecture or SAP’s business information warehouse. Unfortunately, tuning the performance of an SAP R/3 system is very difficult because both the R/3 application system and the underlying database system must be tuned. Furthermore, the performance of an R/3 system can suffer because parts of R/3 were designed and implemented in the early eighties at a time when commercial database systems and their interfaces were immature. Finally, SAP R/3 is an open system that allows customers and third-party vendors to integrate specialized modules which are not part of the R/3 standard. Such modules can severely hurt the performance of the whole system, if they are poorly implemented. The purpose of this paper is to give an overview of various performance aspects of SAP R/3. This paper describes tuning options and experiences for transaction processing (OLTP) and query processing