We have often been asked by customers who use SAP and SAP BW whether we could enhance our product Safyr® to show the SAP BW Extractors and the Tables they access.
These Extractors are functions in the SAP system that extract data from SAP and pass it across to BW for Business Intelligence purposes. Being able to understand which tables are accessed by these functions is a vital part of tracking how data moves through the SAP landscape.
To support this requirement, we have been working on a new version of Safyr that does just that and have released that functionality in the latest version of our software.
We have been able to identify the Extraction functions and the SAP tables they access. In order to make it easy and straightforward for you to search and find this information we added a new ‘tree’ to our ERP Hierarchy capability for SAP. We call this one the OLTP Source tree.
It’s similar to the SAP Program Tree that we have had in the product for some time, however it focuses on those nodes that identify these OLTP Sources.
The screenshot below gives an example of how this looks:
SAFYR ERP Hierarchy for BW Extractors
In this technical example, the SAP Business Partner component (AP-MD-BP) contains a Development Class (or Package) called ‘Extraction of SAP BW Payment Cards’.
This in turn contains a Function Group with a similar name and this contains a Function ‘Transfer of Payment Cards’. This function is associated with the OLTP Source ‘SAP BW: BW Extraction Credit Cards’.
Finally, we can see that the Function Group selects data from the list of tables shown in the list (ADRP, BCCPS…..).
Notice that the OLTP Source has the object type shown at the end of ‘OLTP-Src(F*)’. This means it is an OLTP Source of type Function. We also show OLTP Sources that are based upon a Table or View and these will appear with a type of ‘OLTP-Src(V)’.
As with the other Hierarchies in Safyr, there is a search feature to make it easier to navigate what is a large number of nodes. Examples of the type of searches which are possible include:
- Find all the places that a given Table is referenced by an OLTP source
- Find all the OLTP Sources that contain the description ‘customer’
If you would like to learn more about how Safyr could help you, please contact us for an exploratory call.