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15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Well explained, but no detailed step-by-step cooking recipes, October 15, 2000
By A Customer
There aren't many books about SAP's business warehouse. I think this one is by far the best. It is also the first one to cover the latest versions 2a and a bit of 2b. The drawback is that it is spread out over 1.2b, 2a and 2b. This means you constantly have to filter information and consider what is relevant to your own system. This does not make a difficult topic any easier. The general availability version became available about the same time this book was published. Perhaps one reason it is noticeably short on 2.0b features, although it does briefly cover the new ODS (not to be confused with the old 1.2b ODS which has been renamed PSA). One of the nice points about this book is a list of places to find more information, from third party tools, to performance benchmarks, useful websites and other interesting books. Hashmi is very good at explaining the concept behind BW. This is important because just mastering the technical aspects of customizing is not enough. You have to have an idea how you should design everything, what makes sense and what doesn't. He does start to explain how you can actually implement your solutions, but I had been hoping for him to do this more extensively. Much more extensively. Ideally, I would have liked him to take a few fairly simple reports and - in each relevant chapter: data extraction, ODS, infocube, query, update and transformation rules, uploading data, etc., - show in detail how to customize the different parts of BW and discuss the pros and cons of different solutions. I realize that this would have made the book a lot thicker, but manuals covering Microsoft's office applications routinely fill a 1000 pages. My advice: Read this book and then take a training course or two.
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