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CD265

My first session today was a hands-on session on ABAP debugging.  Not part of my day job, but something I need to know about when working with performance issues.  As usual with TechEd sessions, a few features are not quite ready for prime time.  I thought the typo on "mircoseconds" was a little obvious, but who knows.

My tweets during the session:

•  Ran into Oliver Mayer of SAP at #sapteched09 breakfast. Now waiting for CD265 State of the Art ABAP Troubleshooting to start. 150 p handout!
• #sapteched09 session CD265 ABAP troubleshooting room is packed. Christoph Stoeck talking about the ABAP kernel and more.
• "Only this tools is able to trace the flow of ABAP programs on statement level (except debugger scripting.." Must parse grammar #sapteched09
• Christoph Stoeck demoing debugging of SE38 "Program Not Found" #sapteched09
• Can use transaction SAT to analyze a running program. Win! #sapteched09 CD265
• Olga Dolinskaja showing "new" ABAP debugger in #sapteched09 CD265 - manipulating contents of internal table for test conditions.

There was a brief discussion of the newly available secondary indexes for internal tables.  Seems like a win but until we're on a release with that feature I can't test.  One of the debugging exercies (albeit somewhat contrived) showed the potential improvement with this logic.

The note I wrote to myself said:

"WITH NON-UNIQUE SORTED KEY"
NW 7.1 (not 7.0 per slide)
downported to EhP2, 7.0
Planned release dates available soon

The ability to turn on and off the tracing during screen navigation looks like a simple improvement that should allow noise filtering and thus quicker problem resolution.

One attendee asked about statements stuck in database calls, and Christoph said that the new debugger won't analyze that any better than the old one, as the DB code is not visible to the ABAP kernel.

Later portions of the session got into switching into and out of the new debugger, and the wealth of new functions available.  I was impressed with the ability to manipulate internal table content for testing purposes, including reading and writing to local files.

The audience literally went "Ohh, Ahhh" when Olga demonstrated ways to save parameters as a test data file.

UP211

Harald Reiter did a last time slot session on "Transform Your SAP NetWeaver Portal Into an Enterprise 2.0 Portal".  I might not have known much about this topic beforehand, but left much richer than I started.  Harald had 25 - 30 people in the audience, and I don't think anyone left.  He offered to share tips on short cuts he found in the global project he has been working on, plus there were many good questions.

He kept teasing us with the the promise of a demo, but ran out of time.

Departing Phoenix

I'm going to wrap up this final blog of the Phoenix SAP TechEd week.

Hotel provided recycling bin

Harald lecturing (SAP Mentor laser in hand)

Phoenix Light Rail at the Jefferson and 3rd stop