An Oracle White Paper May 2011

Optimizing Storage in SAP with Oracle Database 11g Release 2

Optimizing Storage in SAP with Oracle Database 11g Release 2

Introduction ........................................................................................ 1 Optimizing Storage in SAP with Oracle Database 11g Release 2 ..... 2 Storage Efficiency .......................................................................... 2 Index Compression and Bitmap Indexes ........................................ 3 Oracle Advanced Compression ......................................................... 3 OLTP Table Compression.............................................................. 4 SecureFiles Compression and Deduplication ................................. 4 Backup Compression ..................................................................... 5 Network Compression.................................................................... 6 SAP Benefits with Advanced Compression .................................... 6 Implementation Overview for Compression in SAP Environments . 6 SAP R/3 and BW Tables -- Compression Results Examples ......... 7 Additional SAP Compression/Storage Capabilities ............................ 8 Deferred Segment Creation ........................................................... 8 Dictionary Only Add Column .......................................................... 8 Unicode Charactersets .................................................................. 9 Additional SAP Compression/Storage Benefits .............................. 9 Conclusion ....................................................................................... 10

Optimizing Storage in SAP with Oracle Database 11g Release 2

Introduction
Using actual customer data, Oracle Database 11g Release 2 compression and space optimizations reduced the overall size of SAP systems from 4.7 TB to 1.9 TB for R/3 (ECC6.0), from 1.4 TB to 0.5 TB for BW (7.0) and from 0.9 TB to 0.3 TB for CRM (7.0). As this customer data shows, the benefits from compression can be significant, yet some organizations still have uncertainty regarding the performance impact that compression may have on their systems. Oracle testing, using compression on a SAP R/3 (ECC 6.0) system under production load, has shown that Oracle’s revolutionary compression technology provided storage savings with no significant overhead in CPU consumption, required 60% less physical reads and produced a 10% better database cache rate. Exponential increases in data volumes in recent years have put enterprise IT infrastructures under severe pressure – from a cost, performance, scalability and manageability perspective. It has become imperative to employ more efficient ways of storing and managing data to meet the growing demands being placed on IT systems. Drastic increases in storage volumes are evident in all types of applications, however, enterprise applications have proven to be among the fastest growing applications. Businesses also have growing requirements to run applications and analytics faster and faster in spite of the growth in storage volumes. The capabilities provided by Oracle’s Advanced Compression Option (ACO) enables many customers to run the database in an in-memory mode by being able to fit the entire working set of the application in memory after 2x to 3x compression – giving applications a significant leap in performance. And given the growth experienced by today’s databases, operations like backups are increasingly seen as taking longer to perform – Oracle’s Advanced Compression Option can help make those operational tasks faster, thereby providing both storage efficiency + performance as benefits. Even prior to Oracle Database 11g Oracle had already been a world leader in storage efficiency for customer data – Oracle's database size is generally significantly smaller than other databases because of the key attributes of Oracle’s data representation on disk (see