Customer Reviews

SAP Business Intelligence (BI)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I was quite excited when my boss picked this book up for me at the Analytics & Reporting conference that is put on by the publisher. We are starting on a BI implementation and I want to learn more so I can be of greater value to my team. This book will be a marginal help in that area.

The first chapter starts off with a a great overview of SOA and the direction SAP is taking BI and its various tools. This chapter was very well written and had me excited to read more. The second chapter does a hundred page overview of each of the new and improved features over previous (BW3.x) versions. In my opinion this should be an appendix, but I quickly realized that this was not written for me. When I got to the next chapter on data modeling the book skips all concepts and just jumps right into a very detailed step by step comparison between RSA1 in 2004s v 3.x... uhh didn't the last chapter do this already? I mean did I miss something or was the title of this book Upgrading from BW 3.x to BI 2004s?

After skimming the rest of the chapters I can safely say that this book is aimed almost exclusively at people that are upgrading. I took the intro reporting class for BI, so the BEx sections make more sense.

I think that the bulleted points on the cover of the book are true to their word even if the title is not.
- Complete and targeted overview of all new BI features and functionalities
*** This is certainly true, but if you are looking for an introduction to the concepts around SAP BI this is not a good book.

- Comprehensive information on SAP NewWeaver Visual Composer and BI Accelerator
*** This may be the best feature of the book. I will almost certainly do a lot of work in VC so the 90 page tutorial on VC may be worth the price of the book. I do not have VC installed and our sandbox system is pretty minimal so I can't tell for now.


All in all I think that this book has a lot of good information for a BI professional, but it is poorly organized and aimed at someone with previous experience. I guess if they wrote a good intro on this stuff they would have trouble getting people to go to the BW310, BW305, and BW306 at $3k a pop. This may seem a bit cynical, but where are the intro to SAP BI books that explain the difference between an InfoProvider, InfoObject, InfoSource, and a DataSource? The only place I know to get that info is BW310... I guess it is a good thing I should be going sometime soon because this book does not even mention those types of basics.