Analyzing Problems Using ABAP Short Dumps: Part I

ABAP 'short dump' (German Kurzdump) is a misnomer. There is nothing 'short' about an ABAP dump. Should the ABAP AS no longer be able to execute a program - because of an unhandled or unhandleable exception, a resource or system problem, or an error in coding - it may document the problem with 20 or more pages of diagnostic information.
Very often, a short dump contains not only the exact diagnosis of the problem that occurred but also the solution, or at least important pointers toward the solution of the problem. But experience has shown that developers often don't even read dumps - not even the highly useful Error analysis - much less make use of the diagnostic resources that short dumps offer.
The lack of attention to short dumps is understandable but regrettable.
Understandable  because the report that your program is dumping in a customer system is about the worst news you can get. It's time to drop everything and switch to emergency mode. 
Regrettable, because often developers who don't take a good look at the short dump waste a lot of time thrashing around in the debugger, trying to understand what went wrong. Taking a good look at the short dump is usually a better use of your time. And then there are the situations in which the dump is the only diagnostic resource that you have - when the dump occurred in a production system and is too sensitive to repeat, when the dump occurred several hours after the background job started, and so on.
In this pair of weblogs, we will take a quick tour through the ABAP short dump as of NetWeaver Release 7.0 EHP1, pointing out important analytic aids that it offers and how to make the best use of them.
In the first weblog, we will just get ready to analyze a dump. The weblog looks at the ABAP dump lists and how to get the most out of them, as well as at a couple of related sources of information.
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Author: Stephen Pfeiffer
Source: sdn. sap. com

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