Performace Impact due to unreferenced Supplier Master Data

[Former Member]

Hi

We have uploaded approx 200 thousand distinct Supplier master records. Only 30 thousand Suppliers are referenced in PO and Invoice,

Is there a performance impact by retaining the unreferenced Suppliers in the master data?

Regards

Neel

[Former Member]

Rajesh & Rohit, Thanks for your guidance as usual.

Regards,

[Former Member]

Hi Rohit,

We will certianly check setting in BW.

But any recommendation on deleting this junk master data if we decide to do so. We are thinking of using BW Function Module and may write a custom program.

Regards

[Former Member]

Hi Neel

The deletion is at a data level and from an application point of view, we cannot decide which masterdata will be needed and which wont and then delete the ones that are not required.

You would need to figure that out and either delete manually /or thru some sort of a script, which given the volumes would make more sense. Not sure if BW provides a mechanism of deleting un linked masterdata entries.

Regards

Rajesh

[Former Member]

Master data deletion is not an easy task in BW. First off you need to ensure that all transaction data related to master data has been deleted, without which cannot delete any master data.

There are several techniques used to delete master data and I am sure there are several papers or 'How to...' guides that will guide you through it. Below are few notes in regards to this topic hopefully will guide you are point you in the right direction.

OSS notes:

1370848 - New Master Data Deletion - Information

1261437 - New Master Data Deletion - Pilot Note

Here is a help.sap.com link that also give you some information "[Deleting Master Data and Texts for a Characteristic|http://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw04/helpdata/en/80/1a6365e07211d2acb80000e829fbfe/frameset.htm]"

Rohit

[Former Member]

Rohit / Rajesh,

Thanks again for the reply.

Options you talked about in Point 2 & 3. Is this is the setting out of box or is it something that has to be done explicitly in BW ? And why would one do that when Master data w/o any Transaction reference is of no practical value, atleast in Analytical world if not Transactional.

Regards

[Former Member]

This is set correctly out of the box, but I would recommend to double check this setting if you know that certain dimension will have large set of values compared to other dimension.

I cannot think of the business scenario right now, but this option is available and has been used at several customers.

Regards,

Rohit

[Former Member]

Also what do you recommned for deletion of this junk supplier master data, if need be ?

[Former Member]

Hi Rohit,

Thanks for your quick reply.

Point1 - Understood. This could impact Data load like PO

Point 2 - We are using DSE which will be normalizing the suppliers which will be added to Hierarchy. However 'orphan' suppliers will be clubbed under 'unassigned' as you mentioned. But the impact of this on hierarchy is not clear. In fact this entry shouldn't even show-up as there will be no spend against it.

Point 3 - Impact on look-up is the major concern as it can affect everyday use of the application. Even in this scenario if look-up is done after report is pulled then supplier entries are already populated with valid ones ( which have spend to report on ).

But if the look-up is done upfront to filter the value even before report is run then it may have the impact you are talking about as it will bring full supplier list including un-assigned suppliers.

Is this analysis correct ?

Hi Rajesh,

Are you referring to any setting in backend B/W ? As in SPM UI you set can filters on dimensions and save.

Thanks!

[Former Member]

Hi Neel

I am talking about standard BW settings for the filtering value help. They get inherited by SPM automatically.

Regards

Rajesh

[Former Member]

Neel,

Point 2 - If you are using DSE then yes suppliers will be normalized and you should not see any issues and also yes most of the time queries are setup to display master data only when there is transaction associated with it. But there is an option to display master data even if there is not transaction against it and this is when it can hurt to have large master data that is not being used.

Point 3 - In most cases the select filter box is set to bring up only values that are relevant for this specific navigation step, but this can also be changed to display the master data values which could have a huge performance impact in your case.

Rohit

[Former Member]

Neel,

There are few places I can think of having performance impact:

- During transaction PO load when a the system has to check to see if a specific supplier exists or if it has to be inserted the system has a huge list to compare against. This can increase your transaction data load times.

- During hierarchy generation if certain supplier values are not part of the tree the system creates a special node called 'Not Assigned' and dynamically add entries in here. Depending on the number of entries the system has to maintain here the hierarchy execution can get slow.

- Also there could be impact on the select filter value box look-up if the system has a very large hierarchy if most of the entries does not have transaction entries(depending on how the select filter value box is setup).

Rohit

[Former Member]

Hi Neel

To add to Rhoit's very valid points, if you have configured filter value help to be supplied from master data instead of transactin data, then having a slimmer set of suppliers (or any other masterdata for that matter) would help with the performance of the filter.

Regards

Rajesh