SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW) is a data warehousing application that can transform data to facilitate reporting and analytics. It can help businesses reduce operational reporting needs, improve information quality and maximize data warehousing costs.
Up until 2010, when the in-memory database platform replaced it, BW was a data-agnostic solution that worked with several databases. However, with the release of SAP HANA, BW has moved toward a more integrated integration with this new platform.
Query Form Builder
SAP BW is a software package for data warehousing that offers a unified data model for various internal and external sources. To learn more about these solutions, you can visit websites like SAPinsider. This solution harmonizes and consolidates data, enabling users to analyze business trends and plan future activities.
Originally released in 1998 as the Business Warehouse Information System (BIW), BW enabled reporting on transactional data without impacting production systems. While computers have improved a lot since then, hard drives are still slow enough that they limit performance when analyzing gigabytes or terabytes of data. SAP BW on HANA overcomes this limitation by operating entirely in memory, which increases speed and dramatically accelerates a range of reporting and analysis tasks.
A recent upgrade to BW on HANA has made it possible to create new BI views using the SAP Web Intelligence query designer. This tool allows you to define columns as either attributes or measures and to join data from multiple tables. You can also select from a list of predefined SQL statements to construct your query.
Analytic Views
An analytic view contains two kinds of columns: attributes and measures. Attributes are the raw data for a database table, and they can be processed using the SQL functions SUM(column name>), MIN(column name>), or MAX(column name>). Measures are calculated values based on attribute data aggregated in SELECT statements. An analytic view can be included in a query form definition along with other views, and its attribute data can be used in the query’s result set.
An alternative to traditional InfoCubes, an analytic view can be defined as a single flat structure with no dimension tables or E * tables. Analytic views can also use SAP HANA features like the column store and In-Memory Calculation Engine to improve query performance.
With BW on HANA, you can get quick ROI through improved performance. Reports that used to take days to run can now be finished in a fraction of the time, making it easier and faster to make informed decisions about the business.
Integration with other SAP Applications
When SAP BW was first released, it provided an elegant solution to the problem of analyzing transactional data on limited hardware. It extracted the data from the business system and loaded it into a separate landscape optimized for analytics. The result was an enormous performance increase and a separation of data that could be managed and monitored independently from production.
This scenario is still very common for synchronizing customer data between CRM and ERP systems or integrating third-party purchase order systems. The new standard API for SAP is a great way to integrate applications with SAP BW without modifying existing code.
These approaches are based on best practices that suit most conditions, but other integration patterns might be more advantageous for specific requirements and environments.
For example, the product data that is transferred to the BW system by the InfoObject 0CRM_PROD or 0BBP_PROD can be automatically mapped to an SAP Cloud application database table and then accessed from the BW system through a data source connection. This allows the SAP Cloud application to analyze this data and reduces the load on the BW system.
Reporting
The SAP BW software offers several prebuilt business intelligence tools for its users to take advantage of. These tools can assist in gathering and analyzing information from various sources at the company level. This is important because only with accurate information can correct actions be taken for company development.
SAP BW is a data warehouse system that gathers information from various systems and consolidates it into one location. Its purpose is to provide a central source of credible data that can be analyzed for long periods. This is done using its query forms and the ability to create analytical views.
It can also transform and cleanse the data and has an open architecture for integrating systems. Its structure consists of a combination area and a staging area. The combination area contains the data acquisition, transformation, consolidation, and storage layers. The staging area is where the data is held and is accessed by the reporting layer. The reporting tools available in SAP BW, called the Business Explorer (BEx), must provide the filtering and navigation functionality that most C-Level executives would like. In addition, these tools require specialist IT resources to set up queries against the InfoProviders and don’t provide the flexibility that most business users need.
