DataStage and SAP extraction The Open Hub

So you are about to migrate (finally) from that ancient BW datawarehouse to the new spiffy SAP Netweaver enabled one you say? Well, thank goodness you have all your extracts in DataStage so migration should be pretty straight forward, right? Not so fast!

We started our migration almost a year ago. I was new to everything, new job, new software (both DataStage and SAP), new people. My first assignment would be to assess what the lelev of work would be in migrating our BW extracts to BI 7. I started with the Ascential (err...IBM) manuals for the SAP BW Pack. That's where I ran across this little tidbit..."During the initial install of the Ascential PACK for SAP BW you will be prompted to choose either the Open Hub Extract stage (3.5 or greater) or the Extract stage for supported versions less than 3.5 (less than 3.5). The
Open Hub Extract stage and the Extract stage cannot exist on the same machine."

Did you get that last line, "cannot exist on the same machine?" So, that's the first gotcha. You have to have a license to install this on another server. Fortunately, or DataStage (err. ..IBM Webshere) representative were great and they provided us with a time limited copy to help in the transition.

So, Lesson 1 - you need a separate server and license.

Of course the same is also true for your client install! So, you will need a second client install (on a different machine) so that you can migrate and test your DS jobs.

Lesson 2 - you need a separate place to put the client software if you intend on maintaining your existing code while you migrate.

I partially solved this second item by installing the client software on the new server and then just remoting in. But if you have several developers this can be a problem.

Next - DataStage and that pesky SAP GUI (along with passwords)