I got my eye on SAP now. This will be the final piece in the puzzle of information mashing in EALIS.
With Eclipse, I manage to understand their data structure in one day. It was straight forward, even for a person who never use their software it was clear what each table do, the tables are named with their description in mind, you want to know the equipment table, there’s a table with the name equipments in it, the same goes with document. And then the relation between tables is clear. With SAP this was not the case.
My first surprise came when I first logged to the database, see the standard DB on MSSQL, look for the odd one out and expands it, . . . . . quite some time, . . . 1 minute passed, 2 min, Only after the 5 minutes mark all the tables are loaded. When I worked with Comos there were like 30 tables, only like 8 are used often, ECLISPE like 50, with most of them being blank [feature that we didn't use] only like 4 that are used in my code. But with SAP I’ve lost count, by the looked of the tiny size of the scroll bar I knew that there is no point in even counting the number of tables. It took forever to scroll with the down arrow key, then switched with page down, as I moved though the tables I noticed that the name of the table is in code, most of them are like 5 characters long [even with 5 char table name , they manage to fit thousands of tables]. Blows.
The one good thing about SAP compared to Comos, PI and Eclipse is that it was SAP. So looking for help online was a breeze, you just need to use the right keyword. Help will even come from SAP themselves through forums and wikis, millions of them. My first query was one SAP table numbers, . . the answer starting from 2000 and up, damn. Then the second query is on Function Location, as this is the key field that’ll be connecting Equipment Tag on Ealis with SAP. Single query I get what I wanted, IFLOT. Do a query on the table, and managed to see something familiar, an equipment tag [KKS]. Nice. But no desc, looked at the table list and queried tables with similar names, and managed to get the description from IFLOTX. Then realised about IFLOS. Noticed the different method of Function Location implementation among our power plant.
I don’t use SAP that often, once a year we do our Performance Review on SAP, and every now and then I need to release a PR. So making a sense of the table structure was a challenge for me. Just like the table name, the column names are in 5 letter codes. So even if I comes across a meaningful data I wouldn’t know. But my aim was simple to get detail on work order and maintenance plan on each equipment. I managed to get the stuff I wanted and wrote a simple code within 2 days.
Even with a working code I’m still not sure whether I got the right data on. Noticed different way of using SAP affect data on the Database, one of the plan actually tie work to a Function location instead of the equipment that is parked below it. Then one of the biggest request was to get to get long text, from the work item. Checked online, no easy solution, data is in database but not in text, it’s in some code only SAP kernel understand. Most of the advice points to ABAP programmer. Not an option.
