Unit 1(Day 2): Data Warehousing
Against this background, SAP decided to create its own data warehousing Solution that classifies reporting tasks as a self-contained business component. To circumvent the numerous disadvantages associated with reporting in the ERP system (see the Fundamentals lesson), data storage, management and reporting takes place on a separate server, the SAP BW server.
SAP BW enables Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) for the staging of Information from large amounts of operative and historical data. OLAP
Technology permits multi-dimensional analyses according to various businesses perspectives. The SAP BW server, which is preconfigured for core areas
and processes, allows you to examine the relationships in all areas of your Organization. SAP BW provides targeted information to companies, divided into roles. This information helps your employees to carry out their tasks. With the Business Explorer (BEx), SAP BW provides you with a flexible reporting and analysis tool to support strategic analyses and decision making processes within your organization. These tools include query-, reporting- and OLAP functions. Employees with access authorization can analyze historical and current data at differing levels of detail and from different perspectives. They can use the Web or Microsoft Excel to do so.
SAP BW Architecture
Source Systems
A source system is a reference system that functions as a data provider for SAP BW. SAP BW distinguishes between four kinds of source systems:
mySAP.com components: SAP BW is fully integrated into the new mySAP.com world. It functions as a central data warehousing tool.
Predefined extraction structures and -programs, also called Data Sources, are delivered by SAP. These allow source data from mySAP.com
components to be loaded directly into SAP BW.
Complex organizational structures in which data from individual
SAP BW for carrying out comprehensive reporting.
. Non-SAP systems:
A big advantage of SAP BW lies in the fact that is
has an open architecture vis-a-vis external OLTP providers and other
legacy systems. Particularly in a heterogeneous system landscape, it is
thus possible to use SAP BW as a consolidated data basis for reporting
that covers the entire organization. SAP delivers various tools which
allow these interfaces to be implemented quickly and efficiently. These
are looked at next.
. Data providers:
As well being able to obtain data from a variety of
available systems, SAP BW can also be supplied with target-orientated
data from providers. For example, the organizations AC Nielsen US or
Dun & Bradstreet provide market research data, which can be loaded
into SAP BW for benchmarking and then measured against your own
Operative data. The interface for the transfer of data supplied by the data
providers is already available in SAP BW. This means the data import
can run smoothly.
. Databases
: SAP BW allows data to be loaded from external relational database systems. A DataSource is generated based on the external table structure, enabling table content to be loaded quickly and consistently into SAP BW.SAP BW Server
The central administration area on the SAP BW server not only features a .Staging Engine., which controls the data loading process, as well as processing and preparing its data, it also features SAP BW databases which store master-, transaction and metadata.
The Administrator Workbench is responsible for organization within SAP BW. In other words, the control, monitoring and maintenance of all data
plan load processes using a scheduler, and monitor them using a monitor tool. However, before the data is in a suitable form to be stored, it must be prepared by the Extraction, Transformation and Load (ETL-) process.
SAP BW OLAP
The Online Analytical Processing- (OLAP-) processor allows you to carry out Multi-dimensional analyses of SAP BW data sets. It also provides the OLAP tools with data via the BAPI, XML interfaces.
In principle, the OLAP area can be divided into three components:
• BEx Analyzer ( Microsoft Excel based) • BEx Web Application
• BEx Mobile Intelligence
You can use these tools to carry out both Microsoft Excel- and Web-based analyses across several dimensions (such as time, place, product, and so on) Simultaneously. The following section looks at the OLAP tools in greater detail.
