Establish Database Administration Procedures

Use

To establish and document administrative procedures for maintaining your database in your SAP environment

You can have different procedures for the development, quality assurance, and production systems. If you have mobile clients, establish database administration procedures for them also.

During implementation of the SAP solution, the database can grow as data is written to it. Databases consist of container files (data files) that store the data in tables or indexes. As these tables and indexes grow, the data files, tables, and indexes must be maintained. If they are not maintained, parts of the database can overflow, resulting in errors and downtime.

Procedure

1.       Establish database administration procedures for all the SAP databases. If you have remote databases on mobile clients, include them too. Modern databases have a common design, but the exact procedures for each database are different. Also, you may have more than one database type in your SAP infrastructure. Establish database administration procedures for:

-         Increasing the size of data files

-         Increasing the size of log files

-         Creating new data files

-         Moving data files to new locations

-         Reorganizing tables, indexes, and data files

-         Modifying parameters of database profiles

-         Database inconsistency checks

-         Monitoring the database to avoid potential problems

-         Database backup and recovery, including test and verification of database restore procedures

2.       As some administrative tasks require the database to be down, plan carefully how to minimize downtime for maintenance. To help prevent unexpected problems:

-         Monitor the database activities constantly

-         Assume rapid growth of the database

-         Plan administrative tasks

3.       Use appropriate tools for database administration.

-         Minimizing downtime should be a criterion for deciding which tools to use.

-         For Oracle and Informix databases, SAP provides the administration tool sapdba. It is menu-driven and secure. In combination with CCMS, it can be used to schedule tasks and set alerts. Sapdba writes a log file of each task performed, and before any file modification, saves necessary files in case of problems.

4.       Designate a person to be the database administrator. This person must:

-         Know that sufficient database maintenance is necessary to maintain availability

-         Know the database and the tools necessary for administration

-         Schedule predefined jobs to monitor the growth and consistency of the database

-         Have a named substitute to take over if necessary

5.       Ensure that the tools work as expected. For example:

-         Configure the tools for your database

-         Adapt alert thresholds to your needs

-         Monitor the growth of the database

-         Schedule tools to prevent an overflow of the database

Result

Database administration procedures established and documented for the SAP system(s)

Responsible resources assigned

Refer to the section Database Interface, Database Platforms (BC-DB) in the SAP online documentation.

For information appropriate to your database, see the SAP Knowledge Product SAP DBA.