SAP TAO and Panaya – Complementers and not competitors

Panaya is new Software as a Service solution that reduces the cost and risk of making changes to ERP systems. The tool was founded in 2005 by Yossi Cohen, an expert in the field of application management.


It is designed for business users, from CIOs to business analysts, Panaya automatically analyzes the impact of pending business process changes and informs all stakeholders on a need to know basis. Panaya can be used during implementation, maintenance and upgrades.


Utilizing a SaaS model, Panaya can be deployed within a few hours to instantaneously lessen the risk of business disruption and reduce ERP maintenance costs.


What Panaya provides?

• Effective Test Management
• Shows you what will break
• Tells you exactly what to test
• Automatic code corrections
• No more test maintenance: test scripts always stay up-to-date
• Creates test scripts for you, as you go
• Tests can be run manually or automatically
• Test results are documented for you

What can be achieved by using Panaya?

• Cut 70% of your SAP upgrade cost and Effort.
• Cut 50% of your planning and development costs.
• Enable companies that use SAP to save up to 50% of their application lifecycle costs.
• Minimize the risks associated with system changes.
• Utilizing cloud-based simulation to analyze the impact of pending changes, Panaya automatically pinpoints which custom programs will break as a result of an upgrade or support package implementation.
• No Installation required.
• Reduce risk of post go-live downtime.

How it complements SAP TAO?

• The main pre-requisite for automation using SAP TAO is availability of manual test cases in a standard format. Panaya provides manual test cases as you go saving lots of time and effort.
• SAP TAO has high reusability and ease maintenance – minimal effort is required during maintenance phase – Panaya can really help TAO when SAP Upgrade happens.

How to unleash the best of Oracle Features… Part I

In this series, I will cover some of the Oracle features that can be easily implemented to optimize our PeopleSoft environment.

Resumable Space

In todayworld, we will hardly find a database that is not monitored for space usage. But there is still a possibility for our process failing because it ran out of space in the UNDO tablespace or user defined tablespace or the DBA was too late to allocate the required space. Majority of PeopleSoft processes have restart capability. However, there might be instances where you just cannot afford to let the process fail and restart from the last commit/rollback step, example – data conversion during cutover.

The Resumable Space feature provides the facility to suspend transactions when they hit the space errors. The transaction will resume when the error is corrected.

Below are the steps to implement this feature for a SQR process.
1. Modify the SQR to include the following procedure which will be called at the start of the process.

begin-procedure SetResumable          ! Set RESUMABLE in current session

begin-SQL
ALTER SESSION ENABLE RESUMABLE;
end-SQL

end-procedure

2. Create an AFTER SUSPEND trigger to monitor any transactions which have been suspended

CREATE OR REPLACE TRIGGER resumable_alert_notifier
AFTER SUSPEND
ON DATABASE

BEGIN

– LOG ERROR
INSERT INTO RESUMABLE_ERR_LOG (
SELECT SQL_TEXT, ERROR_MSG, SUSPEND_TIME
FROM USER_RESUMABLE
WHERE SESSION_ID = (SELECT DISTINCT(SID) FROM V$MYSTAT));
– Send Email notification using UTL_SMTP
– Code not shown

END;

You can determine the best strategy (notification or timeout or abort or log error) when transaction is suspended by coding in the AFTER SUSPEND trigger.

Summary
Resumable Space is a cool feature and I recommend it be considered for implementation in your production environment to avoid business critical processes from failing when it encounters space issues. As with any implementation the mantra is “Understand > Plan > Implement in non-production db > Test > Test > Test > implement in production > relax”.
Read More About  Oracle Features