If you have an SAP source that contains a large volume of data, you need a high number of read and write operations to process the data. As the number of read and write operations increase, the session performance decreases.

To improve the session performance and more efficiently process the data, you can enable compressed data transfer while reading data from SAP through ABAP. You can enable compressed data transfer when you read data from SAP ECC version 5.0 or later. To enable compressed data transfer, add the FileCompressEnable custom property at the session level or at the PowerCenter Integration Service level and set its value to 1.

When you enable compressed data transfer, the ABAP program compresses the source data into blocks and then loads the data to the staging file. The PowerCenter Integration Service then reads the compressed data from the staging file and writes it to the target. By compressing the data, you reduce the number of read and write operations that are required to process the data. You also reduce the amount of disk storage that the staging file needs. Therefore, the session performance improves.

For example, you want to read data from an SAP table that contains 5 million records. You need 5 million write operations for the ABAP program to load the data to the staging file. Similarly, you need 5 million read operations for the PowerCenter Integration Service to extract the data from the staging file and load it to the target. When you enable compressed data transfer, assume that 100 records are compressed and stored in one block. Then, you would need only 50000 write operations and 50000 read operations to process the data. Similarly, you also significantly decrease the disk storage that the staging file needs because the records are compressed.