Here is another in our occasional series of data models. This one is a little different, in that it is about SAP Business Warehouse (BW).
Part of the reason I’ve done BW this time is that we get a lot of demand for this capability. Despite SAP introducing their in-memory database HANA a couple of years ago, BW seems to be as popular as ever. HANA can dramatically reduce access times for data, meaning that the need to summarise data for reporting purposes is also reduced. But that does not seem to have made a big impact on the BW market – or not yet.
The challenge of course, as with finding relevant data models in SAP, is to be able to locate the what you need in BW and understand it in the context of the task at hand.
The diagram shown is of a BW InfoCube, which is the multi-dimensional ‘object’ of a BW system. Whereas the main tables in a SAP transaction system will be largely the same from implementation to implementation, the nature of a BW system is that it provides BI information and the Cubes therein are often created by the customer to address their own particular Business Information requirements. This adds complexity and therefore to the time and effort needed to find and understand it.
There are, however, a set of InfoCubes that are delivered with the BW system by SAP (sometimes referred to as ‘standard content’) and one of these is a Demo Cube – which is what I have chosen to use for this example.
Using Safyr to understand details of SAP BW cubes