1    Introduction to SAP BW/4HANA

In this chapter, we’ll look at how SAP BW has evolved until now and what makes SAP BW/4HANA different. We’ll also provide a high-level overview of SAP BW/4HANA’s capabilities.

SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW) as an application has been around since 1998 and has evolved tremendously over the years. With SAP BW/4HANA, SAP is taking a step toward discontinuing the legacy SAP BW application and replacing it with a more modern and agile application that should help improve the time to information for companies. This chapter will look at the history of SAP BW, then give a brief overview of SAP BW/4HANA and the implementation approach options available for SAP BW/4HANA.

1.1    History of SAP BW

SAP BW was developed as a product for offloading the reporting workload from SAP R/3 systems to avoid performance issues caused by reporting and improve analytical capabilities with online analytical processing (OLAP) “slice and dice” analysis, allowing for easily interchanging measures and characteristics at runtime. In this section, we’ll cover some of the main SAP BW releases and what capabilities they offered to help illustrate how SAP BW became what it is today.

Figure 1.1 shows the SAP BW releases timeline, starting in 1998 and running to 2016 and the release of SAP BW/4HANA.

Figure 1.1    SAP BW Release Timeline

1.1.1    SAP BW Release 1.0

The first release of SAP BW wasn’t generally available. A few select customers agreed to be part of a pilot program and started their implementations with SAP BW 1.0, but most customers went live with release 1.2 in the following year.

The initial SAP BW release 1.0 was based on Ralph Kimball’s data mart principles, described in his book, The Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit.

The InfoCube was the only InfoProvider type that could be used for reporting. What set SAP BW apart from other tools was that SAP included standard data models and extraction programs for a few reporting areas with SAP BW, which gave customers quick implementation of elements such as sales reporting compared to building custom data marts.

The frontend for release 1.0 was Excel-based and had slice and dice capabilities. This was a great improvement over some of the list reports available in SAP R/3. The frontend tool was based on SAP’s Open Information Warehouse Excel frontend for SAP R/3 and was further developed for SAP BW.

1.1.2    SAP BW Release 1.2

SAP BW 1.2A was released in 1998; release 1.2B in 1999 was the official release, with general availability for customers to implement SAP BW for production use.

SAP BW release 1.2 provided a small set of data-modeling options structured around the following elements:

• Standard extractors
  Standard extractors were available for many more SAP R/3 modules, and flat file loading was available to load external data into SAP BW.
• Transfer and update rules
  Transfer and update rules were used to apply transformations to the data in SAP BW. The rules allowed for full use of the ABAP Workbench and programming language, which made them very flexible.
• InfoObject
  InfoObjects were the building blocks of SAP BW and provided the capability to build both simple and complex data entities with master data, language-dependent texts, and hierarchies.
• InfoCube
  InfoCubes were the multidimensional data marts used for reporting; all queries were developed on InfoCubes. The extended star schema made it possible to build models that reused InfoObjects across subject areas, but data integration required all fact data to be in one InfoCube.
• MultiProvider
  MultiProviders introduced the capability to union data from multiple InfoProviders for use in reporting. This opened the option to separate data in InfoProviders by data type and combine it for reporting.
• SAP Business Explorer frontend tools
  The frontend tool was SAP Business Explorer (SAP BEx) analyzer, embedded as an add-in in Excel; this new tool had new features compared to the Open Information Warehouse tool. The query development tool was accessed from within Excel, and the result grid was rendered in Excel. In addition, SAP provided an open interface option based on Microsoft OLE DB for OLAP. This allowed for tools like Cognos and SAP BusinessObjects to consume data from SAP BW.

1.1.3    SAP BW Release 2.0 and 2.1

SAP BW 2.0 was released in 2000 and introduced several new capabilities that had been lacking in release 1.2, allowing for better data modeling and consumption of reporting. SAP BW 2.x was a significant extension from the data mart architecture and included some of Bill Inmon’s information factory concepts, such as the operational DataStore (ODS) object.

Some of the most notable features introduced include the following:

• Operational DataStore
  The ODS object allowed for flat modeling of objects rather than the start schema modeling offered with InfoCubes. It also allowed for delta calculation when a record was loaded multiple times, thus allowing for just changes to be loaded to InfoCubes.
• Web reporting
  The initial release of web reporting in SAP BW was quite crude and required many workarounds, so many customers didn’t make use of the web reporting until later releases. SAP BEx in Excel was still the main tool.

1.1.4    SAP BW Release 3.x

Late 2001 saw the release of SAP BW 3.0A, which introduced new tools that some customers had requested. However, the major 3.x release came in 2004 with SAP BW 3.5, which offered enhancements such as the following:

• InfoSpokes
  The 3.x SAP BW releases included InfoSpokes as a first method for SAP to address a concern of many customers, centering on getting data out of SAP BW and loading that data into other tools or data marts.
• SAP BW InfoSet
  The SAP BW InfoSet object was introduced to allow for joins between tables and for reporting on the joined objects. InfoSets had been available with SAP R/3 for years and were modified slightly to fit in as an object type in SAP BW. They still had performance issues, however, like those experienced in SAP R/3.
• Virtual providers
  Virtual providers were introduced to allow for real-time reporting of data in SAP R/3 and for combining it with data in SAP BW. This solution worked well for small datasets but had severe performance issues with larger datasets.
• Analysis Process Designer
  The analysis processes were introduced to allow for modeling of data processing inside SAP BW and were very useful for calculating top customers for customer segmentation and other such information.
• SAP BEx frontend tools
  The major new feature was in new set of frontend tools that provided great improvements in capabilities and better integration with both Excel and web-based reporting. The SAP BEx browser was replaced with the SAP Enterprise Portal. The Excel add-in was improved, and the web reporting was completely revamped and included more Excel add-in features.

The SAP BW 3.x releases provided a robust data warehousing solution for enterprises and were the starting point for a lot of implementations of SAP BW.

1.1.5    SAP BW Release 7.0 to 7.3

SAP made a lot of changes again with the release of SAP BW 7.0, also called SAP NetWeaver 2004s when released. This release was also the base for all development up until today’s version of SAP BW.

The SAP BW 7.0 to 7.31 release time frame stretched from 2005 to 2012; there was development but were no major changes aside from the SAP BusinessObjects integration, which started when SAP acquired BusinessObjects in 2008. The features that had the biggest impact were as follows:

• Write-optimized DataStore objects
  The write-optimized DataStore objects (DSOs) were introduced to allow for the implementation of Layered Scaleable Architecture (LSA), which uses several persistent layers of data during the transformation.
• OpenHub destination
  SAP replaced the InfoSpoke object with OpenHub, which also introduced separate licensing for OpenHub to allow for distribution of SAP BW data to other applications with non-SAP named users.
• Transformation
  The transfer and update rule “double” transformation logic was replaced with a single object called transformation. Transformations allowed for both start and end routines and expert routines.
• Data transfer processes
  The info package loading process was partially replaced by data transfer processes (DTPs).
• Composite provider
  The first versions of CompositeProviders were introduced in SAP BW 7.3 to replace InfoSets, but they had severe performance issues with large data volumes.
• New frontend tools
  The SAP BEx analyzer as we know it today was introduced in SAP BW 7.0; it’s undergone some enhancements but is still very much the same tool used now in SAP BW 7.5. The web applications and web templates have also not evolved much since the initial release of SAP BW 7.0.
• Integration with SAP BusinessObjects
  The reason for the lack of development of the SAP BW frontend tools was that SAP acquired BusinessObjects in 2008; hence, most frontend development effort centered on integrating the SAP BusinessObjects tools to consume SAP BW data. The integration took effort away from most legacy SAP BEx tools, except maybe the query designer, which is still used heavily with both SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence and SAP Lumira Designer.

1.1.6    SAP BW 7.4 and 7.5 Powered by SAP HANA

In late 2013, SAP BW 7.4 was released, the first version of SAP BW developed to take advantage of the SAP HANA platform. It included some new features specifically optimized for use on SAP HANA, as follows:

• Advanced DSO
  The Advanced DSO was introduced in SAP BW 7.4 SP 08 and was built to replace all other DSO types, as well as InfoCubes. It required a lot of SAP Notes to get the functionality working as expected; hence it was recommended to be on SAP BW 7.4 SP 12 before using Advanced DSOs.
• SAP HANA CompositeProviders
  The SAP HANA CompositeProviders were also made available in SAP BW 7.4 SP 08, but also required a lot of SAP Notes. On SAP BW 7.4 SP 10 with some additional SAP Notes, they were usable.
• Open ODS views
  The Open ODS views were more stable and provided a great way to expose an SAP HANA table to the SAP BW OLAP engine without having to load the data into an SAP BW object first. The functionality is also possible to achieve with SAP HANA CompositeProviders, so Open ODS views weren’t used much.
• SAP HANA analysis process
  The SAP HANA analysis process was introduced to replace the Analysis Process Designer; it opened a new world of features from the SAP HANA platform, such as integration with the Predictive Analysis Library (PAL) and database procedures.
• BW modeling tool
  The BW modeling tool provided a new, modern frontend option for development integrated into the SAP HANA Studio Eclipse tool. The SAP GUI tool could still be used for most old development tasks, but new object types had to be developed in the BW modeling tool in Eclipse.
• Data flow modeling
  Data flow modeling was a new way to build data models in the BW modeling tool, providing a more graphical depiction of the data model and flow of data.
• SAP HANA views
  As part of the integration with the SAP HANA platform, SAP HANA view modeling was available. All SAP BW objects could generate an SAP HANA view that could then be used for additional modeling in SAP HANA. The views could also be accessed directly by SAP HANA database users from tools like SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence, SAP Lumira Designer, SAP Lumira, and a variety of third-party tools.

SAP BW Object Inflation

The enhancement and development of SAP BW over the past 20 years has caused an inflation in the number of objects available for modeling the enterprise data warehouse. A lot of object types were developed for very specific niche use cases and caused a lot of additional logic to be built into the OLAP engine in SAP BW. Figure 1.2 illustrates the inflation in object types over the years and the complexity that SAP BW developers and support staff had to manage.

Figure 1.2    SAP BW Innovation and Increase of Object Types