The growth must stop! (Patch and Installation Sizes just keep going up!)

Hi fellow consultants,

I started developing and implementing B1 here in Canada in the late 2002.

With version 6.5.

Back then, an sap patch was 70mb!

With every new patch I saw them grow, and grow and grow… slowly but surely.

I noticed the pattern within the first year and told myself (“They can’t keep growing… They will surely make a cuttoff version soon and reset the patch content right?”)  Wrong…

Since 2002, the patch and installations of SAP Business One have simply grown And at a steady pace too.

to give you an accurate example, if you go on the archive section of SAP B1 installation, go find the last patch of version 2004. You will see the it is 105 mb.

So from 6.5 to 2004 the patches grew from 70mb to 105mb… not too bad I guess.

Patch size by the end of :

Version 6.5: 70 mb

Version 2004: 105 mb   =       50% Growth

version 2005: 263 mb    =     150% Growth

Version 2007: 874 mb   =     232% Growth

Version 8.82: 2591 mb =     196 % Growth

Now in 2013, the latest patch for 9.0 Patch 3 is 3,523mb!!! That is a 35% growth for the first patch of the version… If the trend continues then by the end of this major release (2015) we will have to justify downloading patches in excess of 9000mb

Does SAP really need to include every single update since the beginning of time in every subsequent patch? No… that is what update cutoff points are for.

Every once and a while, SAP creates a new full install. A stand alone installation that we can install on a clean server.

To a certain point, I can understand that this particular installation will have a substantial size since it contains everything needed to install the full system.

But an update should only contain the data and files necessary to make up the difference between the clean install and the patch being installed.

I just wonder when someone important enough will take notice and do something about this.

Ahhhh that makes me feel better to finally have gotten that off my chest. haha

I would be very curious to know your thoughts on this mater.

Regards,

Denis