Where Can I Find the Sizing Guide for SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence 4.3?

I noticed that none of the links work on my 2017 article Where Can I Find the Sizing Companion for SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence 4.2?. Between changes to SAP’s support web sites, SAP’s bipolar we-hate-you/we-love-you relationship with SAP BusinessObjects customers, and possibly even the COVID-19 pandemic, the old guides have been lost. Thankfully, “version 1.0” of the SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform 4.3 Sizing Guide was published earlier this year – June 9, 2023 to be precise- and placed on the SAP Help Portal where it is easy to find.

This document rarely gets the attention it deserves. The previous version for 4.2 was published in 2017 and the version prior to that was published in 2014. The new version doesn’t mention a version history, hence the new 1.0 designation. It also doesn’t mention an author, as putting your name on a SAP BusinessObjects sizing document often results in a premature death to one’s career at SAP.

These limitations are worth pointing out because the document would have benefited from a “what’s changed” section. For example, Is there any advice that’s new or contrary to advice given in previous sizing guides? And while the guide presents a sample architecture for Adaptive Processing Server (APS) configuration, the guide neglects to point out that there are APS services that simply should not be combined with other APS services, as they do not play nicely with others. I also have the unproven suspicion that certain APS services should only have one per cluster node, as having more than one results in buggy or undesirable behavior – Data Visualization (CVOM), I’m looking your way. Oh, BTW, “memory allocation for CVOM needs to be done based on how the charts are created”. That’s not ambiguous at all!

The guide concludes by recommending that BI Administrators perform a sizing activity every six months. I’d definitely recommend revisiting sizing before adopting a new version (moving from 4.2 to 4.3) or service pack (applying the December 2023 release of 4.3 Support Pack 4), even if you’re not upgrading hardware. You may find that some of your sizing assumptions are carry-overs from XI R2, XI 3.0/3.1, or BI 4.0/4.1 especially prior to 4.1 SP7 (see related article, Should I “Enable Memory Analysis” on a Web Intelligence Processing Server?).

So while I’m thankful that the sizing guide has been updated and placed in a logical location, I hope that we’ll see a version 1.1 or version 2.0 updated for the forthcoming SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform 4.3 Support Pack 4, which will be the last support pack before the next major release of the platform, currently known as BI 2025.