Enterprise Performance Management

(SAP EPM): Performance Analysis and

Optimization for BPC 10
Posted by Sascha Tom Ulbrich Jul 9, 2013
In this blog post I want to share some experiences I made in the context of performance analysis
and optimization for BPC 10. First of all I had to figure out which techniques to use for performance
measurements. There are several ways to measure and analyze response times like BPC internal tools
or external tools like Fiddler which I want to address briefly in this blog post. Furthermore, I want to
give some information about techniques like splitting up a report which for sure is a bit complicated
but offers a great potential. Finally, I will sum up the best practices and I will try to give you an
orientation where you can gain quick wins in performance topics.The measurements were performed
on a laptop with an Intel Core i5 processer, 8 GB memory and Microsoft Excel 2010 with the SAP EPMAddin (SP12 patch 8) and an Application Server with SAP BPC 10 (CPMBPC 800 SP 09).

How to measure
To get sufficient information about runtimes you have to distinguish between
the Application Server and the (Excel-)Client with the EPM-Addin. In order
to measure comparable values I defined the metrics shown in Figure 1.

Figure
1: Metrics For the client times I decided to use the EPM Performance Trace (perfTrace.glf) with log
level DEBUG because the level of detail is adjustable and I got all information I need. This information
is visualized in Figure 3. Be careful with a higher log level because it will have a negative impact on
performance and could lead to false conclusions for performance optimization. For further information
regarding the EPM Performance Trace see http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/CPM/EPM+Add-In
+Logging. If you are familiar with Fiddler you can use it to measure the runtimes of the queries as well.

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Enterprise Performance Management (SAP EPM): Performance Analysis and Optimization for BPC 10

2: Screenshot of EPM Performance Trace

3: Information from EPM Performance Trace For the server times I used the transaction UJSTAT which
is part of SAP BPC. To activate these statistics you have to set the model parameter BPC_STATISTICS
to ON via using the transaction code UJ0_IMG_03 for the model you want to have statistics for. See
Figure 5 for a visualization of information I used from these statistics. The Shared Query Engine (SQE)
is the engine used to process the queries and decides whether to execute a SQL query or a MDX query.

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Enterprise Performance Management (SAP EPM): Performance Analysis and Optimization for BPC 10

4: Screenshot of the statistics report retrieved via transaction UJSTAT

5: Information from the statistics report

The calculations of the metrics are defined as follows:
Client preparation = Start time of first query start time of refresh process
Client rendering = Duration of refresh client preparation duration of queries
Server preparation = Query Engine C Runtime Query Engine T Runtime
= Query Engine T Runtime
DB query
Server processing = SQE T Runtime Query Engine C Runtime
Data transfer
= Duration of refresh SQE T Runtime

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Enterprise Performance Management (SAP EPM): Performance Analysis and Optimization for BPC 10
Note that the metric DB query includes the creation of the query (MDX or SQL).To get meaningful
results I executed the refresh for each measurement ten times and calculated the arithmetic average.

Figure

6: Example visualization of a server measurement

Optimizing the server time

At the beginning I experienced constantly long runtimes (several seconds) for the server
preparation time. Cube optimizations didnt help to solve this problem but activating a caching
mechanisms for hierarchies by setting the environment parameter ENABLE_SHARED_OBJECT
according to note 1657612 (https://service.sap.com/sap/support/notes/1657612) led to much better
performance. During the performance optimization I tried also to split the report into MDX and
RSDRI (SQL) parts to measure the impact on performance, especially the server time. See http://
wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/CPM/EPM+Add-in+Academy -> Butterfly Report for an example
of a report with shared axis and Figure 7 for a visualization of a simple example with a lot of
data. When splitting up the report you have to consider that RSDRI queries are only used when
only base level members (no aggregations) are retrieved. Note that the % Reached column
is a local member to calculate the percentage actually reached from the plan value. For Local
Members see http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/CPM/EPM+Add-in+Academy -> Local Members

Figure

7: MDX and RSDRI(SQL) parts of a report

This example report can be built in multiple ways. The simplest way is using one report
causing one huge MDX query. An alternative way is to use Local Members to calculate
the totals for Europe because all children of Europe are displayed below anyway. This
would enable you to divide the report into one report with 2011- and 2012-Totals (MDX)
and one huge report with the monthly data (only base level members -> SQL query)

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Enterprise Performance Management (SAP EPM): Performance Analysis and Optimization for BPC 10
as shown in Figure 8. Note that all Productgroup rows have to be Local Members.

Figure

8: Splitting up the report

Based on this splitting I also implemented the 2012-Total columns as Local Members because these
data are calculated with the monthly data display in the other columns. This reduces the MDX query
further.

Optimizing the client time

While analyzing the client time it showed that formatting can have a huge impact on performance.
Formatting is done via a separate formatting sheet where the formatting rules are defined.
In general you can do formatting based on hierarchy levels or based on the member and
its properties. Additionally you can use the excel functionality conditional formatting.
To use this functionality in the formatting sheet see http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/
CPM/EPM+Add-in+Academy -> Conditional formatting. In my example I achieved the best
performance by using only hierarchy level formatting in combination with conditional formatting.

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9: Screenshot of the EPM Formatting Sheet

During the analysis of the client time I also experienced long runtimes caused by VBA coding. After
some tests it showed that the EPM Add-in notices changes done via VBA coding and tries to interpret
them. The simplest solution was to avoid this by deactivating the events while the execution of VBA
coding. Furthermore I deactivated screen updating and automatic calculations during code execution
to improve performance:
Application.ScreenUpdating = False Application.Calculation = xlCalculationManual Application.EnableEvents = False
Key findingsAfter a lot of measurements and some optimizations I analyzed the results and summarized
the conclusions in the following key findings. In my case I could reduce the overall runtime of a report
by 80%.
Usage of bufferA correct sizing of the buffer and the usage of the environment parameter
ENABLE_SHARED_OBJECT is very import (more than factor 10 for server preparation time), especially
when using a huge amount of master data records. The parameter enables some caching mechanisms. See
note 1657612 (https://service.sap.com/sap/support/notes/1657612) for further information and guidance
to activate the parameter.
MDX and RSDRI queryAs already recommended for BPC 7.5 splitting the report into MDX
and RSDRI(SQL) queries has an positive impact on performance. By using one MDX query
(as small as possible) and one RSDRI query (as large as possible) the best performance
improvements were achieved. RSDRI queries are much faster, but can only be used for
base level members (without aggregation). For the examples mentioned above the best
performance was achieved with a split into two reports and Europe rows and 2012-Total
columns as Local Members. The DB query time was reduced from about 20 seconds to 2.3
seconds while the client rendering time doubled from about 1 second to nearly 2 seconds.

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Figure

10: Measurements of split reports

Local MemberThe usage of Local Members is not very expensive and can be used to calculate the
aggregates (to achieve a RSDRI query).
FormattingThe formatting has a huge impact on performance as well. Simply turning off the
formatting is the easiest way to estimate the impact. The excel functionality conditional
formatting (see http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/CPM/EPM+Add-in+Academy -> Conditional
formatting) and the formatting based on member properties (functionality of the EPM
formatting sheet) has a moderate impact on performance. The functionality Dimension
Member Formatting (by ticking off the second box of the formatting sheet) should only be
used with SP13 Patch 3 or higher and the impact on performance has to be evaluated carefully.

Figure

11: Measurements of client rendering times

VBA CodingThe usage of VBA coding can lead to very poor performance. The code itself has to
be optimized and standard technics like deactivating automatic calculations and screen updating
during execution of the VBA coding have to be applied:Application.ScreenUpdating = False
Application.Calculation = xlCalculationManual Application.EnableEvents = False Especially the
command EnableEvents = False has a huge impact. If the events are not turned off, the EPM
Add-in will recognize the changes in the report and will try to process them. Turning the events
off is a performance improvement for the VBA runtime by factor 100. Dont forget to reactivate
the disabled features at the end of your coding: Application.Calculation = xlCalculationAutomatic
ActiveSheet.UsedRange.Columns.EntireColumn.AutoFit Application.EnableEvents = True
Application.ScreenUpdating = True Useful resources to apply optimizations Hopefully you got some
useful information to analyze and improve your BPC. Here are some links which helped me a lot and
hopefully will do so for you. I already mentioned some of them in the text. Im looking forward to

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your feedback!Set Environment parameter ENABLE_SHARED_OBJECTSAP Note 1657612: https://
service.sap.com/sap/support/notes/1657612Splitting the report:http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/
CPM/EPM+Add-in+AcademyLocal Members are useful for calculations of aggregations (instead of
MDX queries)http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/CPM/EPM+Add-in+AcademyUse and optimize
VBA code http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-excel/archive/2009/03/12/excel-vba-performancecoding-best-practices.aspxCalling the EPM API:http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/CPM/EPM+Addin+AcademyAPI documentationhttp://help.sap.com/businessobject/product_guides/boeo10/en/
EPMofc_10_user_en.pdfUse conditional formatting http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/CPM/EPM+Addin+AcademyEPM Logs:http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/CPM/EPM+Add-In+Logging 1139 Views
Tags: enterprise_performance_management, bpc_10, performance_optimization
Nov 5, 2013 7:49 PM Mark Liston

Sascha-

Good work here. What are the sizes of your F and E tables of cube? What did the
application server look like from a hardware perspective?

Thanks,

Mark

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