Frying your
infrastructure
Are RDBMS really useful in a distributed
realtime enterprise system ?
Overview
 Quick SAP application infrastructure runthrough
 SAP application evolution: Enterprise Services & Smart Items
 Oops: frying the old infrastructure
 Lessons from the Web Services rewrite
 Conclusions and SAP Research ideas
 SAP AG 2005, Frying your infrastructure, Burkhard Neidecker-Lutz / ‹#›
SAP: Lots and lots of business applications...
 SAP AG 2005, Frying your infrastructure, Burkhard Neidecker-Lutz / ‹#›
...on a common infrastructure
 Portal
(People, Roles, KM, Collaboration)
 Exchange Infrastructure
(Process Integration, Messaging)
 Business Warehouse
(Analytics)
 APO
(Planning, Optimization)
 Search
(TREX)
 Web Application Server
(Everything...)
(i.e. SAP takes a pretty broad definition of „application server“)
 SAP AG 2005, Frying your infrastructure, Burkhard Neidecker-Lutz / ‹#›
Anatomy of a workhorse: SAP Web Application Server
Connectivity Layer
Internet Communication Manager (HTTP/SOAP/etc.)
Web Client
Web Browser
Web Application Server
ABAP/J2EE
Presentation Layer (JSP/etc.)
• Presentation Logic
Dispatcher
• Navigation
• Interaction with Client
Business Layer (J2EE/ABAP)
• Business Logic
• Status Dispatcher
Administration
• Locking/Enqueue
Integration Layer
Integration Tools:
• Java Connector
• .NET Connector
• XML/XSLT
Dispatcher
• SOAP
• WSDL Proxies
• BAPI/RFC
• IDoc
• etc.
Database Server
Persistence Layer
Database Interface (JDBC/OpenSQL)
 SAP AG 2005, Frying your infrastructure, Burkhard Neidecker-Lutz / ‹#›
Remarks on SAP Applications
SAP Web Application Server
 Very robust, complete resource isolation (even for J2EE)
 RDBMS (ab-) used as a persistence layer for almost everything
 Not particularly lightfooted
 Heavyweight sessions
 Accrued portability layering over the years
SAP Application Design
 Database transactions only used for error rollbacks
 Locking mostly handled at AppServer level (Enqueues)
 Isolation mostly handled at application level
 SAP AG 2005, Frying your infrastructure, Burkhard Neidecker-Lutz / ‹#›
Global Industry Survey: The world in 2010
Interviewing more than 4000 executives and managers
 The ability to adapt strategy and business models
quickly will be a critical source of competitive advantage
 Firms will focus increasingly on speed of innovation and
customer retention to create long-term value
 Market consolidation will continue, lots of mergers and
splits
 People are the biggest asset and the biggest cost factor
 SAP AG 2005, Frying your infrastructure, Burkhard Neidecker-Lutz / ‹#›
Flexibility: From monolithic applications to Web Services
Information
Technology
Solutions
UI
UI
Process
Innovation
Solutions
UI
Composite Application
Functional
components
DB
SAP NetWeaver
DB
 3 tier applications
 Coded transactions
 Best practices
 SAP AG 2005, Frying your infrastructure, Burkhard Neidecker-Lutz / ‹#›
 Service-oriented applications
 Model-driven applications
 Best practices and platform
Smart Items
RFID
Barcode
scanning
Voice input
Manual
data entry
Attaching the real world: Eliminating media breaks
Digital world („Bits“):
• Inter- and cross-company
information systems
(e.g.: ERP systems)
• Local, regional and global
communication networks
(e.g.: Internet)
Physical world
(„Atoms“):
• Human beings
• Products
• Production means
State-of-the-art
Next Generation Smart Items
Source: M-Lab, 2001 (http://www.m-lab.ch/)
 SAP AG 2005, Frying your infrastructure, Burkhard Neidecker-Lutz / ‹#›
Degree of
automation
Performance matters: Realtime Application Scenarios
Asset Tracking
 Hospital inventory
 Machines and parts
 Supply Chains
Emergency Response
 Vehicle dispatch & tracking
 Workplace safety
Security
 Behavior mining
 Intrusion detection
 SAP AG 2005, Frying your infrastructure, Burkhard Neidecker-Lutz / ‹#›
Putting it all together: Retail example
Customer
Loyalty Mgmt
e-Commerce,
Catalog &
Call Center
Store Operations
Store
Inventory
Mgmt
Customer
Order Mgmt
Personalized
Promotions
In-Store
Customer Service
POS
Store
Workforce/Task
Mgmt
Demand Intelligence & Analytics
Collaborative
Revenue
Planning &
Optimization
Collaborative
Merchandise &
Assortment
Planning &
Optimization
Sourcing
Human
Resource
Supply
Planning
Product Design
& Introduction
Foreign Trade
Management
Multi Echelon
Inventory Planning
& Optimization
Workforce
Planning &
Optimization
Enterprise & Merchandise Operations
Finance
Collaborative
Demand
Forecast
Enterprise
Operations
Retail
Master Data
Operational
Purchasing
Distribution Center Operations
Warehouse
Management
Transportation
Management
 SAP AG 2005, Frying your infrastructure, Burkhard Neidecker-Lutz / ‹#›
Multi-Channel
Order
Fulfillment
Inventory
Mgmt
…
Supply Chain
Event Mgmt
Business Data Warehouse
Global Master Data Management (Exchange & Consolidation)
Multi-Channel Sales Operations
Infrastructure challenges
Event Rates
 Hundreds of readers in a warehouse
 Bursts of hundreds of events per reader per second
 Reaction times on the order of seconds in some scenarios
Data Volumes
 Billions of objects in a large organization (retail forecast & replenishment)
 Some organizations are required to maintain history over 3 or more years
 Analytics need to deal
Cost efficiency
 Sometimes do this on a shoestring budget
 Deal with unpredictable load patterns (the curse of business flexibility)
 Keep it all manageable
 SAP AG 2005, Frying your infrastructure, Burkhard Neidecker-Lutz / ‹#›
Net result: Frying your infrastructure
General purpose RDBMS no longer a good fit for these tasks
Good at
 Transactions on a few records at a time
 Search with well (pre-) designed queries
Not so good at:
 Very long running transactions
 Mass operations
 Ad hoc analytics
 Streams
 SAP AG 2005, Frying your infrastructure, Burkhard Neidecker-Lutz / ‹#›
Business Process Platform: The big rewrite
 SAP AG 2005, Frying your infrastructure, Burkhard Neidecker-Lutz / ‹#›
Observations from the Enterprise Services rewrite
 You can do without distributed transactions for even very
complex business systems
 Database-based consistency can be replaced with
message-based consistency
 Extremely stylized use of DB
 model generated
 transaction design patterns
 A lot of DB functionality factored out (by design):
 No cross-component transactions (design rule)
 Search (capturing updates allows for separate engine)
 Analytics designed for separate engine
 SAP AG 2005, Frying your infrastructure, Burkhard Neidecker-Lutz / ‹#›
SAP Enterprise Services
 SAP comitted to Enterprise Services across the board
 New design opens up lots of flexibility in the lower stack
 Sufficiently coherent data replication in multiple special purpose
engines possible
 Web services semantics require application level recovery already,
negating a lot of RDBMS „comforts“
 Special engines already (partly) there:
 Search (TREX)
 Analytics (EUCLID)
 Planning/Optimization (APO)
 SAP AG 2005, Frying your infrastructure, Burkhard Neidecker-Lutz / ‹#›
Research Idea: Special purpose engines for everything
 Mass operations (prediction)
 Computation -> Data (integrated processing, LiveCache)
 Data -> Computation (mass data services, SAP Research)
 Streams
 Luckily, not yet a big problem for us (other than prediction)
 SAP Research looking for partners
 Very fast „simple“ RDBMS for the rest
 Fast keyed search, update
 Speaking of device evolution: Give me a few Mbyte of MRAM per
machine
 SAP AG 2005, Frying your infrastructure, Burkhard Neidecker-Lutz / ‹#›