In SAP NetWeaver 2004s, BI transitions completely into the SAP NetWeaver landscape and is no longer its own release. The idea of BI encompasses the ability to analyze, plan, and disseminate data through various tools. In addition to improving the core data warehousing features, SAP has enhanced other BI features such as information broadcasting and analytic capabilities. Enterprise Data Warehousing (EDW) serves to consolidate, clean, and efficiently store data from varied sources.

Several new features and improvements in SAP NetWeaver BI help you tackle your back-end computing challenges. They include an enhanced Operational Data Store object (ODS, now called DataStore object), improvements to SAP NetWeaver BI InfoSets, and high performance analytics (HPA). This overview of SAP NetWeaver BI back-end changes covers what I consider the most useful new features, many of which are major improvements over the prior SAP BW Release 3.5.

DataStore Objects

DataStore objects are an improved version of ODS. New types of DataStore objects and performance enhancements allow you to optimize them in various levels of your EDW. For example, if you want to transfer data to BW and don’t need delta features, you would use a standard ODS in BW 3.5. The new write-optimized DataStore object, which I will describe, is a more efficient alternative. Table 1 shows the three types of DataStore objects.

Standard DataStore objects are a lot like the standard ODS, but offer better activation performance. SAP reduced the time necessary to activate data in ODS from SAP BW 3.0 to 3.5, and now this process is even faster in SAP NetWeaver 2004s.

In addition to the standard DataStore objects, SAP created a new write-optimized DataStore object. Write-optimized means that you can transform data more efficiently when loading massive numbers of records when delta features are not necessary.

For example, many data sources can provide an additive delta via an increasing transaction ID or timestamp without necessarily using the delta features of the standard ODS. The write-optimized DataStore object does not have a change log or activation queue, and you can load it via the new data transfer process, which I’ll discuss in the “Graphical Data Transfer Process” section.

The direct update DataStore object replaces the transactional ODS. This is mostly a name change, with nearly the same uses and limitations. For example, with the direct update DataStore object, like its predecessor the transactional ODS, you can not query with BEx tools directly — you must use a BI InfoSet.

SAP NetWeaver BI InfoSets

SAP NetWeaver BI offers improved InfoSets. The capability to join InfoCubes as part of InfoSets results in much more flexible objects. For example, you can easily create a report of slow or no sales customers via a left outer join between master data 0CUSTOMER and InfoCube 0SD_C01.

In addition, you can link an InfoCube to an InfoObject, and this InfoObject to another InfoObject, which gives you access to an attribute’s attribute, known as a transitive attribute. Finally, with improvements to temporal joins and the ability to link to an InfoCube, you could create a pseudo-historical truth report by linking the day of the sales transaction in the InfoCube and time-dependent master data attributes without including these in the star schema.

HPA

Of the many improvements in core technologies, the newest and most promising is HPA. HPA, new with SAP NetWeaver BI, combines hardware technology improvements and the existing SAP NetWeaver TREX search engine features with new algorithms, resulting in incredibly fast queries (Figure 1).

Figure 1

TREX supports HPA in SAP NetWeaver BI

This feature improves query response times tenfold (though 100 or more times faster is possible depending on the hardware used, the query, and the number of records involved). The system accomplishes this without query changes or the costly administration of normal database aggregates and other design techniques.

Graphical Data Transfer Process

SAP NetWeaver BI provides better design tools for the data transfer process and updates the extract, transform, and load (ETL) process to a graphical format (Figure 2). Other ETL vendors (e.g., Informatica, Ascential) provide graphical ETL tools. SAP now has a similar drag-and-drop GUI to create transformation logic inside SAP NetWeaver BI, including the data flow between the Persistent Staging Area (PSA) and data targets in SAP NetWeaver BI or from target to target. In addition, SAP NetWeaver BI offers improvements in error handling during the ETL process.

Figure 2

New design tools for the data transfer process

To support this graphical ETL, SAP uses new terms, so current terms such as InfoPackage and data transfer process change slightly. For a list of the old and new SAP NetWeaver 2004s terms mentioned in this article, see Table 2.

Process Chains

Many clients now use the scheduling tool called process chains. SAP has enhanced it with added flexibility in SAP NetWeaver 2004s. One improvement lets you evaluate the output result of a system command by looking for specific words or phrases.

For example, when your logic processes the server’s response for a file read request, you could evaluate a response like “file not found” and then branch to a process link that would try to read the file again.

Other significant new features involve more control over the consumption of resources (dialog or batch processes) to ensure that you do not jam your system with a chain that has many subchains or parallel branches. Depending on the type of chain you have, the system lets you schedule the chain as a single dialog process and, for other situations, allows you to calculate the number of batch processes the chain consumes before executing it.

Another new process chain feature is the integration of process chains into Central Alert Framework (CAF). CAF is an SAP NetWeaver feature SAP BW 3.5 first used with Reporting Agent. It permits users to subscribe and unsubscribe to many alerts that you can receive via email, Short Message Service (a phone text message), or a Web link. In SAP BW 3.5, exceptions could use CAF, but now a process failure or success message can alert anyone through the generic CAF toolset.

Authorization and Auditing

Improvements supporting compliance and control are timely with the recent emphasis on the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Improvements in this area in SAP NetWeaver 2004s include a new reporting authorization concept and change tracking.

The new authorization concept, now called analysis authorization, fixes some issues with the older method (transaction RSSM/reporting authorizations) and includes the following features:

• Reporting authorization objects are not limited to 10 referenced objects
  
  
• You have direct control over authorization for navigation attributes
  
  
• Complex authorizations provide a union of allowed values

In connection with authorizations, remember that the ability to trace changes to these authorization objects is an auditable activity. SAP NetWeaver 2004s Business Content supports this via RemoteCubes (now called VirtualProviders) and BEx queries that provide reports tracking the authorization objects, number of changes, and who changed user authorizations.

Near-Line Storage (NLS)

Archive support for SAP BW was created in SAP BW 3.0 — but with a significant hurdle. If you wanted to report on the archived data, you first needed to return the records to the database (via an enhancement to the data mart extractor). Although SAP still supports traditional archiving, NLS allows you to read NLS data via the query without reloading it to the database.

SAP NetWeaver BI Administrator Cockpit

Since the early days of SAP BW 1.2B, tools above and beyond the core Basis tools monitored and reported on statistics. SAP BW 2.0 improved these tools and provided a comprehensive Excel workbook with many embedded BEx queries reporting from the SAP statistics InfoCubes and MultiProviders. Although this is a powerful toolset, it lacks Web access.

The new SAP NetWeaver BI Administrator Cockpit provides the missing Web access to performance and status information (Figure 3). The Administrator Cockpit uses SAP NetWeaver Portal (formerly SAP Enterprise Portal 6.0) and iViews derived primarily from existing SAP NetWeaver BI queries.

Figure 3

New Administrator Cockpit

In addition, the Administrator Cockpit can show the CAF alerts discussed in the “Process Chains” section. CAF can in turn link to CCMS issues, such as memory or disk space alerts, and process chains directly or via the CCMS transaction code. Thus, the Administrator Cockpit provides central Web-based access to everything affecting load, reporting, and system issues in an SAP NetWeaver BI environment.

Remodeling Toolbox

The remodeling toolbox is a new toolset to assist in the redesign of SAP NetWeaver BI data targets. In some cases (for example, deleting objects or when you do not need to go back to the source for new fields), you can use this tool to add, delete, or replace new key figures or characteristics in an InfoCube without having to reload all the data from the source again. For new fields, this capability assumes you can come up with the logic of how to derive the new characteristic or key figure.

Navigation/Layout/Organization

Improvements in the area of navigation/ layout/organization include changes to navigation and to the consistency in accessing and creating GUIs.

• InfoCube design and GUI now have the same look and feel as DataStore objects. Gone are the days when the GUI for InfoCube design started with InfoObjects on the right side of the screen, and you had to move objects to the left into the InfoCube. Now the left-to-right GUI based on the ODS design is the standard.
  
  
• The new RSA1 transaction offers better context menus and options; for example, separated tabs now exist for administration functions (e.g., manage, delete, process chains) as opposed to modeling (creating objects). This new organization of paths and menus combines into one-path functions that the same type of BI analyst commonly performs together. For instance, the organizational structure groups data loading tasks separately from data modeling tasks.

GUI to Create DataSources

A new consistent GUI to create DataSources is now available. In the BW 3.5 standard SAP source system, XML, Universal Data Connect (UDC), and Database Connect (DB Connect) data sources had a different look, feel, and menu path. In SAP NetWeaver 2004s, SAP has standardized these wherever possible. Figure 4 shows the new look of DataSources.

Figure 4

Standardized DataSource creation interface

Business Content and Content Management

Improved Business Content and Content Management are features of the new system. Although the metadata repository browser has been a great tool for many years, access to basic information required you to export the HTML files or access the metadata browser via the back-end GUI. SAP NetWeaver 2004s provides a Web template with access to the metadata repository with navigation from InfoAreas to InfoCubes and to metadata repository information for the selected object (Figure 5).

Figure 5

Web template access to the metadata repository

In a related area, tools in SAP BW 3.5 were available to help you create custom Business Content. Large companies could sell or use this content internally. SAP NetWeaver BI for SAP NetWeaver 2004s provides new tools to help manage and ensure completeness (i.e., all interrelated objects are defined correctly) for all of this custom content.

Ned Falk

Ned Falk is a senior education consultant at SAP. In prior positions, he implemented many ERP solutions, including SAP R/3. While at SAP, he initially focused on logistics. Now he focuses on SAP HANA, SAP BW (formerly SAP NetWeaver BW), SAP CRM, and the integration of SAP BW and SAP BusinessObjects tools. You can meet him in person when he teaches SAP HANA, SAP BW, or SAP CRM classes from the Atlanta SAP office, or in a virtual training class over the web. If you need an SAP education plan for SAP HANA, SAP BW, BusinessObjects, or SAP CRM, you may contact Ned via email.

You may contact the author at ned.falk@sap.com.

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