Administration of Oracle with/without SAP

[Former Member]

Hello all.

Currently all our SAP systems are typically installed with all components on one physical server.

Meaning we have the Central instance/Database instance on the same host.

Further we use primarily SAP tools for Oracle administration (BRTOOLS etc).

Looking ahead the number of systems are increasing and what we would like to do, is setting up an Oracle database hotel for SAP systems. Meaning we can consolidate several databases on one physical host and possibly ease administration overhead.

As we separate the database from the application, it's far more attractive to virtualize the application server.

Has anyone here any experience in this regard ?

I realize that administering Oracle "under" SAP, might not be equivalent with "regular" Oracle database administration, for any other application. For instance i understand that not all Oracle functions are supported by SAP. SAP also has their own recommendations for database parameters etc.

We have good Oracle competence within the organization, but these DBA's has no knowledge about SAP.

So the question is: To what extent are we bound to differentiate between regular Oracle DB administration, and SAP Oracle DB administration ?

The point being: If our DBA's cannot implement their own Oracle best practices and administration tools for the SAP Oracle hotel, but rather have to treat this totally different from regular Oracle hotels, then it seems to me that we gain little or nothing.

Any (almost) comments are appreciated.

[former_member204746 · Accepted solution]

One thing comes into mind.

Do you really want to centralized all your Oracle databases on one server? Do you want to put all your eggs in the same basket?

Right now, how many SAP systems so you need to administer?

You might want to consider installing and using Enterprise manager for some basic tasks.

or, check for using BRTOOLS Studio.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Gerhard,

SAP always recommends to use only SAP tools for all the activities like brtools and all. But i dont think its a good idea to create a database hotel for the SAP systems. If you use the oracle tools which are not supported by SAP when you have a problem in the SAP system - SAP support team will not help you to resolve the issue. So always better thing is to use the SAP for SAP database administration.

For a general administration we can use the oracle tools.

Also SAP has defined separate set of oracle parameters. Please check the note for oracle parameters 830576.

For the OS kernel parameters SAP has some separate set of parameters.

Thanks,

Chaitanya.

[Former Member]

Gerhard,

My experience is that non-SAP Oracle DBAs often find it hard to comply with SAP requirements. Sometimes this is plain conservatism: they are used to a certain set of practices and anything deviating from those practices is greeted with criticism. On other points they may be right - I don't know enough about non-SAP Oracle management to judge. From a DBA perspective I would say that having experienced Oracle administrators manage your SAP databases is beneficial as long as (a) you make clear that supported functionality and the scope of the license must be respected, as per notes 105047 and 740897, and (b) SAP recommendations for parameter settings, patches, etc. are to be observed. If you cannot get that commitment then you might be better off not involving them, except in cases where it cannot be avoided (e.g. backups).

Hope this helps,

Mark

[Former Member]

Hello Gerhard,

Idea of consolidating all databases on to a single server may sound technically good, but i am not sure why any one wants to do it and logically doesn't stand very good.

I can see one way of it is, you have huge server and can make multiple resource independent partitions/LPARS , or server with

large number of cores and make solaris zones and create databases on their zones.

My opinion,

You can definitely do that and allocate different set of servers to application tier/middle tier.

However, you still need to follow the guidelines specified by ERP application vendors as these databases support the ERP applications and each application has its own requirements to maintain the integrity of the database and supportability of the database and application.

As far as SAP concerned, it has more stringent practices for managing application, considering the size of the application, modules and complexity, compared to other ERP vendors and dbas can't workaround those requirements.

Hope this helps.

SV