Exclusive Business Warehouse features in SAP BW

The favorite platform for business warehousing and other capabilities, SAP BW has several unique features and advantages. Let us examine some of the highlighting features in this blog.

Modern modeling environment

There is a number of new Eclipse-based modeling editors, e.g. for the composite provider or the new query designer (planned). The modeling paradigms are harmonized with those of the HANA modeler which makes it a coherent modeling environment, especially when combining BW with HANA-native features.

Less modeling objects

The new composite provider can replace the old multi-provider and (partially) the old info-sets. The in-memory DSO is suitable for many reporting scenarios making it obsolete to use info-cubes in those cases. The advanced DSO (planned for SP8) will further simplify the situation.

BPC unified

Classic BPC, BW integrated planning incl. PAK become one with the same software lifecycle and harmonized modeling environments. There are even synergies allowing functions from one end (approach) to be applied to the other. Examples are BPC’s business process flows (BPFs) and the work-status being used on BW-IP models or the performance boosts, especially via PAK, for the BPC models (cubes).

It is more flexible.

In general, BW provides a managed approach to data warehousing. While many cherish this “best-practice” guidance some critics argue it is difficult to deviate from the standard approach in case of special scenarios where it might be easier to program one or the other function, for instance, in SQL or SQL script rather than via complex modeling. BW 7.4 on HANA provides a number of options to do so:

Leverage highly specialized libraries

HANA provides numerous specialized libraries like PAL, AFL, and R to mention a few. Via BW’s new HANA Analysis Process (HAP) capability it is possible to use all of these on top of BW models and consume the result as a BW model.

It performs better.

Querying + Loading

This is the traditional strength of HANA and especially its underlying calculation engine. More of BW’s OLAP features are now compiled into execution plans in HANA. A lot of loading related BW features are executed close to the data thereby avoiding data transport between application and HANA servers. Examples are the DSO activation and the option to compile transformations to be executed in the calc engine. The latter mechanism is also used for HAPs.

Hardly Any Tuning

To admit the fact, performance tuning has not vanished completely but it hasbecome so much easi er. Simply look at the blog 10 years of “no aggregates in #SAPBW. The decrease of support efforts (on the SAP end) correlate directly with the decrease of tuning and admin effort on the customer side. This is real world proof for reduced TCO!

Big Data

Data volumes are no issue, not even on the licensing end through HANA’s extended storage capability. Have a look at this demo that query on top of 2.5 PB of data.