Running out of SIDs (deleting masterdata)

This document is about MOTANID (but the recipe is reusable for other objects of course).

The problem is that the number of rows in the info object has grown so big that we’re about to run out of
SIDs. Well, the problem really is that those SIDs are based on a standard SAP Number Range defined in
NRIV – and that the maximum number is 2.000.000.000!

You can find details in RSDCHABASLOC for MOTANID:

And in NRIV for its Number Range (BIM0015398):

An NRLEVEL of 1.989.234.374 is close to the upper limit.

To solve this issue, we need to be able to delete some of the master data – and to do that we most likely
can’t just run a normal ‘Delete Master Data’ in the workbench (it simply is too big a task to do in one go).

Run the program RSDMDD_DELETE_BATCH_PACKAGE (in SE38/SA38) in the background.

A temporary table will be created holding a Where Used List in order to delete only those records that are
not being used anywhere (two tables actually, one with all keys we’re looking at in this run and one with
the keys that can’t be deleted – in this case all records could be deleted).
When we’re done (in 30 hours or so for MOTANID) there hopefully will be at least one big gap of unused
numbers in the Number Range. This can be investigated using program ZSAP_SIDVALDISTRIB

It shows how the number usage is distributed. Fortunately, in this case there are a lot of free space in one
gap at the very beginning (more than 1 bill. Free numbers).

We can now go into t-code SNRO to find the number range for MOTANID.

Next free number is 1.989.234.374.

We can change that to 1 based on our findings – and now we have more than 1 bill. numbers before we run
into problems the next time.

After the first run the picture is like this – we have started using the low numbers:

This is a good starting point to get to know more about SIDs and number ranges in case that is needed.

https://wiki.scn.sap.com/wiki/display/BI/Number+Ranges+for+Dimensions+and+SID+tables

This note https://launchpad.support.sap.com/#/notes/1331403 tells everything about how to handle

number ranges.