Independent Data Consultancy
UPDATE This has now been fixed: SP4 from patch 000009 onwards SP5 from patch 000400 onwards SP6 For Crystal Server Users, you’ll need to go to SP6. For SAP BI, install the patches or SP6. It looks like there’s a definite problem.I’ve had an odd reply from SAP that talks about moving files from DEV […]
UPDATE This has now been fixed: SP4 from patch 000009 onwards SP5 from patch 000400 onwards SP6 For Crystal Server Users, you’ll need to go to SP6. For SAP BI, install the patches or SP6. First, if you’re just doing a fresh install with no old content to migrate then go ahead. 4.2 SP5 […]
21 years ago, I was still working in the wine trade. At the time, the vast majority of wine was sealed with a traditional cork. Wines at the cheaper end of the market would often use agglomerate corks (bits of cork glued together). Some wines were starting to use artificial corks, but they were often […]
Unless you’ve been on an extended Christmas break with no TV or Internet, you’ll have heard of Intel’s recent troubles. While it’s true that most computers will not be noticeably affected, servers that read and write large amounts of data to disk will be impacted. In my world, that affects two things – databases and […]
This is the first in a series of posts about licence compliance. It’s always difficult to get independent advice on licensing, so I’m attempting to highlight some potential pitfalls. Given the complexities and potential liabilities, you should always refer to your own licences. I’ve been trying to source some useful guidelines from SAP without success. […]
I always enjoy tuning reports for customers. I guess it’s the same satisfaction that people get from doing crosswords – a problem is presented (poor performance), you just settle down and work through the problem bit by bit. First thing I do is to review the subreports. While a subreport can be an essential part […]
Since MS SQL Server 2005, there have been 5 releases (2008, 2008 R2, 2012, 2014, 2016). Each new release came with some interesting new features – for those on the Enterprise Edition. For the majority of users, on SQL Server Standard, there were updates to the user interface and some security patches, but nothing to […]
Customer: Aviation Software House Our customer had an important report that was taking over 10 minutes to run for just a month’s worth of data. New requirements mean that the report needed to be run for a year’s worth of data. Obviously a problem! As is so often the case, the main performance problem was […]
I’ve had an interesting month experimenting with Predictive Analytics using a customer’s anonymised recruitment data. First, I used SAP Predictivie Analytics. It’s a great product, but I found that I felt ‘too distant’ from the analytics process. While the end result is explained in statistical terms, I wanted more control over how the result was […]
Since my original post about the licensing updates, there has been further clarification from SAP. There are now two separate ways of licencing Crystal Server. The ‘old’ way of just buying some licences and paying an annual maintenance fee to a reseller, or the new way of signing a maintenance agreement with SAP as part […]
