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Sap Netweaver Business Intelligence 2004S
Sap Netweaver Business Intelligence 2004S
BY: Santhosh Singh Thakur ASSOCIATE SAP BI CONSULTANT DEXLER INFORMATION SOLUTIONS PVT. LTD
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Table Of Contents
DATA FLOW IN BW........................................................................................................................6 DATA FLOW IN BI7.0.....................................................................................................................7 SOME MORE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN BW AND BI................................................................8 DIFFERENT TYPES OF SOURCE SYSTEMS SUPPORTED BY BI AND THEIR INTERFACES ........................................................................................................................................................8 CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................9 BIBLOGRAPHY..............................................................................................................................9
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Abstract
This white paper aims to give a basic understanding of Business Intelligence terminologies and concepts to a novice user.
Keywords
OLTP, OLAP, BW Accelerator, BW3.5, Info Package, PSA, Data Store Objects, Info Cubes Open Hub Destination, Process Chains.
Introduction
SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse (SAP NetWeaver BW) is the name of the Business Intelligence, analytical, reporting and Data Warehousing solution produced by SAP AG. In the early stages it was named as SAP BIW (Business Information Warehouse), which is then changed to SAP BW. But at enduser level it is known to all as Business Intelligence. It is delivered with different tools so that almost any form of data can be extracted and delivered in the desirable report form. Companies often experience problems when the data they have is not utilized in a proper way. SAP Business Intelligence when implemented successfully plays a vital role in the growth of the organization. The 7.0 version of SAP BI was released in June 2006. It includes many new features such as next generation reporting and analytical features, major data warehouse enhancements, and an external memory resident tool called as BW Accelerator for improving the query performance. It requires a separate licensed fee. In addition SAP acquired Business Objects one of the premier business intelligence software providers, SAP promised to give a tighter integration between Business Objects and SAP BI.
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Project Preparation
Quality Testing
Project Realization
Figure 1: Project Life Cycle Above shown are the stages involved in any implementation of a SAP project where the involvement of the BI is in the project realization stage. A business blue print stage is nothing but a requirement gathering stage where the client is involved.
System Landscape
ECC 6 DEV
TR
OLTP
ECC6 QUA
TR
ECC6 PROD
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DEV: Development
QUA: Quality
The System Landscape for a BI project contains the above shown servers, which also includes transport requests. Once the developments are done in the DEV server, a Transport Request is generated to the QUA server from there to the Production server.
OLTP vs OLAP
OLTP-R3 OLAP-BI
Current data is available in the OLTP Historic data available in the OLAP side Granular data/Detailed data is stored Summarized stored Data Stored in Flat Structures or Tables Data Stored in Multidimensional Structures For example: Info Cubes Not much integration is possible Data Stored for 1-2 years Highly Integrated Environment Data Stored for 5-7 years (or) Aggregated data is
Supports Huge number of concurrent Supports less number of concurrent users users
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Many people do not have a clear understanding what exactly a BI is and what exactly BW is. Here, in this paper I will mention some major differences between this two. BW is the older version (BW3.5) of BI (7.0), which is presently in the market. One major difference between BI and BW is the data flow by which data is loaded in to the data targets.
DATA FLOW IN BW
PSA
Source Systems
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Figure 3: DATA FLOW IN BW In BW data flow the data can bypass the PSA, that is, the info package can directly take the data to the data target. Transfer rules are used to convert the Source System-specific data into the BW-specific data, by eliminating the semantic and technical differences between them. Update rules are used to perform transfer machines required for a business point of view, like for example, perform additional data validations and integrity checks, skip unnecessary data, aggregate data, convert currency, unit of measure and so on.
Transfor mation
DTP
PSA
Source Systems
Info Package
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In the BI 7.0, data flow PSA is mandatory that all the data that is to be loaded have to pass through the PSA. A Persistent Staging Area (PSA) stores raw data from the source systems. In this data flow the Info Package pulls the data from the source system and halts in the PSA. A DTP sends the data from PSA to the Data target. The Transformation is used to match the fields of the source system with fields of the Data target to load data. DTP: Data Transfer Process, ES: Extract Structure, TS: Transfer Structure Some more differences between BW and BI (upgrades from BW to BI)
o In BI, Process Chains are used instead of Event Collector. o In BI, the Remodeling transaction helps you add Key Figures and Characteristics in an Info
Cube while handling historical data effectively.
Different types of source systems supported by BI and their interfaces. BI supports almost all types of sources for extracting data including relational and file systems. The types of data sources and their interfaces supported by SAP BI are shown below.
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File
Web
Database
SAP-R3
File Interface
WebServiceInterface
UD Connect
DB Connect
SAPI
Relational databases
Figure 5: Different types of source systems supported by BI and their interfaces While using flat file interface the formats supported are ASCII/CSV. While extracting data from web the protocol used is Simple Object Application Protocol this SOAP push HTML or XML data to BI. The different components used by UD connect are JDBC, ODBO, SAP QUERY, and XMLA. The components of DB connect are DBSL (database shared library), DBCLIENT SAP R3 is an OLTP system acting as a source here.
Conclusion
This white paper introduces the terminologies of BI with clearly differentiating between BI and BW explaining the different source system and their components.
Bibliography
http://images.google.co.in/imgres?imgurl
http://cscstudentweb.lr.edu/swp/Berg/articles
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Whatis_the_difference_between_sap-bw_and_sap-bi
http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/itanswers/what-are-the-features-in-updaterules-thatwe-cant-find-in-transfer-rules/
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http://www.bridgeport.edu/sed/projects/cs597/Fall_2003/vijaykse/business_content.htm
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/ablxhelp/v8r4m0/index.jsp? topic=/com.ibm.db2.abx.dev.doc/abx-t-develop-sapbwdatasource.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAP_NetWeaver_Business_Intelligence
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