HELP - Agent has put me in a job overseas with no interview, and my skills don´t fit

[Sysman]

I know nowt about SAP, but gut feeling tells me that it's doing a sort or two to use up so much space.

What platform is it running on?

[BrowneIssue]

Well at least my conscience is clear - they can´t accuse me of lying on my CV or anything.

I´ve got a few ideas from the web, but I´m definitely winging it.

There's a difference between bulltulipting and winging it. The latter should work out OK.

About a decade ago I was in a similar position taking on a 'broken' team, 'broken' hardware, 'broken' software, two 'broken' suppliers, a 'broken' client and not a single useful contract in the place to help me. I spent the first 2 or 3 weeks absolutely terrified on the inside and looking cool, calm and collected on the outside.

My wife put in many hours repeating "You CAN do this. Hang on in there."

I spoke to everyone ('managed the stakeholders') and gathered lots of people issues (technical issues are easy). Keep the people happy by listening to them and addressing their issues.

Aim for some 'quick wins'. Since they have taken you on, they must have a few quid kicking around. The disk space solution sounds like one - get on with it!

Produce a 'plan'. (I put it in quotes 'cos it's really a list of broken things.) Everything that is wrong or worth doing. Discuss it frequently with your line manager and for each item on it, have at least a clue about what you intend to do about it. That puts the idea in their head you are taking their problems seriously and that you will be there for some time.

And STUDY!

Remember: broken setups are easy to fix. Ones that are working OK are easy to break. You've actually got an easy job there.

Remember: They Want You There. Trust their decision.

And that contract I had? I was there 5 years and it became the best earning contract I have had to date. When I did 'fess up a couple of years into it, they told me they knew all along I was winging it but they believed I stood a better chance of fixing their systems than anyone else. The buggers had been entertaining themselves watching me cope! Ratbags!

Really, you'll be fine if you keep the communication going and always have a simple plan to hand.

[Weltchy]

Out of interest, how long has this process been running for? What are the relevant file sizes for the database and how big are the transaction logs?

You could probably clear out alot of disk space by truncating the transaction logs.

With regards to the tempdb size increasing to 15gb, have a look inside some of the stored procedures and try and optimize them.

TBH, if you've used SQL 2000, you should have no problems optimizing a 2005 server.

[threaded]

15GB? Pah! Call that a database?

Sheet, my Mac Pro has 32GB and that's just the RAM!

threaded in "and it all gets used" mode

[NotAllThere]

What should I do? Give up and fly home, try to muddle my way through, fess up that I don´t think I can do it, or what.

Muddle through. You'll be learning valuable skills.

I´ve given a description of the problems below in case anyone here knows anything about SAP and a thing called ABAP which I think is about automating SAP procedures.

ABAP is SAP's proprietary programming language. In R/3 SAP definitely do not manage indices themselves. Delivered tables may have SAP defined indexes, but these won't be deleted/recreated by the R/3 programs. ( Except very very rarely).

SAP BW/BI do have some automated mucking around with indices, but I don't know the details. BW/BI performance is an art in itself. There are so many different factors, many of the them site specific. There's a whole chapter devoted to it in the SAPPress book "SAP Business Intelligence". Is your client use the BI Accelerator?

Two sites could be of help. sdn.sap.com have active forums, and don't mind entirely new "dumb" questions. www.sapfans.com is also a useful source of info, but they can be quite hostile to newbies. The noise ratio is much lower than on SDN.

You should look at both the Basis and the BW/BI sections. Most of your issues should be in the former.

[Churchill]

Sheet, my Mac Pro has 32GB and that's just the RAM!

threaded in "and it all gets used" mode

Mac Pie. Shirley?

[KentPhilip]

Thanks for the replies.

The client agrees that more hard drive space is required, so I'm on to my second challenge = which is a query that is taking 55 seconds to complete. SQL Profiler shows that it does 23 million page reads, so it is obviously doing a table scan and not using an index correctly.
When I ran the offending query in Query analyser it said that it could not find any of the 10 tables referenced in the query. So I'm a bit stuffed.
I have a hunch that this OLAP thingy used by SAP works a little different from transact SQL.
Also been yawning too much all day. I'm not cut out to be a contractor (oh hang on I've just left my permie job to become one...)

[Weltchy]

Thanks for the replies.

The client agrees that more hard drive space is required, so I'm on to my second challenge = which is a query that is taking 55 seconds to complete. SQL Profiler shows that it does 23 million page reads, so it is obviously doing a table scan and not using an index correctly.
When I ran the offending query in Query analyser it said that it could not find any of the 10 tables referenced in the query. So I'm a bit stuffed.
I have a hunch that this OLAP thingy used by SAP works a little different from transact SQL.
Also been yawning too much all day. I'm not cut out to be a contractor (oh hang on I've just left my permie job to become one...)

Just left permie job......I see......Did you change to the right database. The dropdown list is located at the top left!!!! Or use "Use [Insert Database Name Here]"

[Cowboy Bob]

When I ran the offending query in Query analyser it said that it could not find any of the 10 tables referenced in the query. So I'm a bit stuffed.

Forget the query analyser. Just use your eyes. Look at the query and see what columns are used in any joins and plonk an index on them if they don't have one. It's not exactly rocket science.

[KentPhilip]

Forget the query analyser. Just use your eyes. Look at the query and see what columns are used in any joins and plonk an index on them if they don't have one. It's not exactly rocket science.

There are 9 tables in the select query. I've checked and they all have indexes on the join columns and where columns.
If I cut the query down to three tables, it returns the results very fast. If I add a fourth table it takes 7 seconds but it is a cross product so the time is probably explained by having to return 2000000 rows.
Maybe SQL 2005 is a crap product that takes two minutes to join 9 large tables.