BLOB, PHIO, LOIO: Alphabet soup in SAP Solution Manager version management
Every SAP application has countless acronyms to keep track of, but I particularly enjoyed a few featured in D. Russell Sloan’s latest Solution Manager Expert article. The article details how you can make custom document attributes to improve SolMan reporting. In doing so, Russell explains up front some features of the Knowledge Warehouse, and specifically how it helps you with version management.
My three favorite acronyms that were mentioned:
1. Binary Large Object (BLOB): The BLOB is the document that you’re working with. It can be virtually any document type — Word, Excel, etc. Solution Manager creates a data record that holds the attributes of the BLOB as well.
2. LOgic
al Information Object (LOIO): I’ll let Russell explain this one, because his analogy is apt:
The LOgical Information Object (LOIO) is in the KW. You can think of it as a folder in a file cabinet. The LOIO is effectively the label or identifier of the file folder. The Physical Information Object (PHIO) is a unique identifier of each version of a document stored in the KW in SAP Solution Manager.
Each version of the document that you save to the KW through editing creates a new BLOB that is stored in the LOIO. Imagine that every time you saved a document, you printed it out and stored the new copy in the same folder (LOIO) in the file cabinet without throwing away the old ones. Each of the copies is uniquely identified in a file folder by its physical existence as a separate document.
3. PHysical Information Object (PHIO): Russell continues the analogy:
In SAP Solution Manager, each version is stored as a new BLOB and is assigned a unique, system-generated identifier called the PHIO.
For example, while I write this article, it is going to go through several edits. I’d like to keep each version for posterity, so I create a folder in Windows to house the different versions. This folder is similar to the LOIO in the KW. Each time I save a version of this article during the editing process, I give it a unique name to track the versions.
For the full article, including seeing the screens and paths in both SolMan 7.0 and 7.1, Solution Manager Expert subscribers can go here. For more information about Solution Manager Expert, go here.
