How Accurate Was SAP on Parallel Processing Working in SNP?

ByShaun Snapp

Executive Summary

  • For years SAP has stated that parallel processing works in SNP.
  • In this article, we review the accuracy of this claim. 

What SAP Said About Parallel Processing Working in SNP

For years SAP included a parallel processing field in the SNP optimizer, giving the impression that one could choose how many processors to address in the optimization.

Our References for This Article

If you want to see our references for this article and other related Brightwork articles, see this link.

Notice of Lack of Financial Bias: We have no financial ties to SAP or any other entity mentioned in this article.

  • This is published by a research entity, not some lowbrow entity that is part of the SAP ecosystem. 
  • Second, no one paid for this article to be written, and it is not pretending to inform you while being rigged to sell you software or consulting services. Unlike nearly every other article you will find from Google on this topic, it has had no input from any company's marketing or sales department. As you are reading this article, consider how rare this is. The vast majority of information on the Internet on SAP is provided by SAP, which is filled with false claims and sleazy consulting companies and SAP consultants who will tell any lie for personal benefit. Furthermore, SAP pays off all IT analysts -- who have the same concern for accuracy as SAP. Not one of these entities will disclose their pro-SAP financial bias to their readers. 

The Truth About Parallel Processing Working in SNP?

After roughly five years using the parallel processing setting in SNP, we decided to test the optimizer’s performance using one processor versus using multiple processors. What we found was there was no difference in the runtime! We covered this in detail in the article How the Parallel Processing Function for the SNP Cost Optimizer Does not Work.

“This is amazing that SAP has had this setting available on the optimizer profile and that the parallelization functionality has either never worked correctly or at some point stopped working properly back in 2003, at least the OSS notes go back to 2003. Secondly, as I am running into problems with it documented as not working in 2013, this means that SAP has not fixed the problem in a decade. I wonder if parallelization has been removed from SAP’s sales presentations on the SNP optimizer. I can’t say for sure – but I have a feeling SAP salesmen have not been telling potential customers that parallel processing is broken.”

The issue is that parallelization of problems is tricky, so SAP gave up….. But they never removed the field, giving SAP configurators and testers the impression that it worked.

Conclusion and Calculation

SAP receives a 0% accuracy rating for parallel processing in SNP working.

Link to the Parent Article

This is one of many research articles on a specific topic that supports a larger research calculation. For the overview of the research calculation for all of the SAP topics that were part of the study, see the following primary research A Study into SAP’s Accuracy.