EZ-XOP and SAP® R/3®

BOC (British Oxygen Corporation) is A multi-national industrial organization serving two million customers in more than 50 countries, employing some 46,000 people and annual sales of over $6 billion in 2002. They are one of the largest and most global of the world's leading gases companies.

In order to better support its compressed gas, processed gas and specialized vacuum and pump product segments, BOC have committed to a global ERP solution based upon SAP® R/3® and IBM DB2® Universal Database for z/OS V7 running on IBM zSeries™

Processing more than 1.75 million transactions daily, performance is a major concern. It is therefore no surprise that BOC decided to evaluate EZ-DB2 Index Optimizer in order to determine the potential for improving performance through improved access paths, and to identify unnecessary indexes. As you may be aware, SAP® R/3® is delivered with over 40,000 indexes, many of which are not required.

The evaluation was highly successful. For example, in the sampled workload, EZ-DB2 identified one particular table with a predicted cost saving of over 90%. Most of this saving was attributable to one particular SQL statement that previously performed over 96,000 table space scans over the two day period monitored. The addition of a new EZ-DB2 recommended index changed the access path to Index Only Access, matching 3 columns. The table space scans were reduced to zero resulting in the aforementioned saving. EZ-DB2 also highlighted numerous unused indexes that are able to be removed.

BOC intend to increase their usage to EZ-DB2 as part of the roll-out of their global SAP® R/3® application.

For further information about BOC go to www.boc.com.