Experience report: exploiting advanced database optimization features for Large-Scale SAP R/3 installations

  • Authors:

  • Bernhard Zeller;Alfons Kemper

  • Affiliations:

  • Universität Passau, Passau, Germany;Universität Passau, Passau, Germany

  • Venue:
  • VLDB '02 Proceedings of the 28th international conference on Very Large Data Bases
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

The database volumes of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems like SAP R/3 are growing at a tremendous rate and some of them have already reached a size of several Terabytes. OLTP (Online Transaction Processing) databases of this size are hard to maintain and tend to perform poorly. Therefore most database vendors have implemented new features like horizontal partitioning to optimize such mission critical applications. Horizontal partitioning was already investigated in detail in the context of shared nothing distributed database systems but today's ERP systems mostly use a centralized database with a shared everything architecture. In this work, we therefore investigate how an SAP R/3 system performs when the data in the underlying database is partitioned horizontally. Our results show that especially joins, in parallel executed statements, and administrative tasks benefit greatly from horizontal partitioning while the resulting small increase in the execution times of insertions, deletions and updates is tolerable. These positive results have initiated the SAP cooperation partners to pursue a partitioned data layout in some of their largest installed productive systems.