SAP BW has recently come to the fore as a valuable tool for developing data warehouses that accurately and effectively support critical business decision making. It facilitates easy-to-use and high-performance extraction, transfer, transformation, and loading of data from a variety of data sources, including such comprehensive business management systems as SAP R/3.

This practitioner's guide uses step-by-step instructions complete with a plethora of screen captures to illustrate key SAP BW functionalities. It demonstrates how SAP BW implements the fundamental star schema and solves the major challenges inherent in the creation of data warehouses: performance, reliability, and error-handling. Using a real-world business scenario as a running example, SAP® BW presents a comprehensive view of the technology, from underlying concepts and basic techniques through its most sophisticated capabilities.

Specific topics covered include:

• Creating an InfoCube and loading the data
• Checking the accuracy of data with BW Monitor and the Persistent Staging Area (PSA)
• Creating queries to generate reports using Business Explorer (BEx)
• Managing user authorization with the Profile Generator
• Advanced InfoCube design techniques
• Aggregates and multicubes
• Working with the Operational Data Store (ODS)
• Installing business content and creating an R/3 source system in BW
• Loading data from SAP R/3 into SAP BW
• Data maintenance
• Performance tuning, including parallel query option and data packet sizing
• Object transport

Although the focus is on the core SAP BW technology, this book also discusses other relevant technologies, including Basis, ABAP (Advanced Business Application Programming), ALE (Application Link Enabling), and ASAP (Accelerated SAP) for BW.

With the clear explanations and practical techniques presented in SAP® BWinformation systems professionals will gain both the general understanding and specific skills necessary to create high quality data warehouses that support effective decision making.

Biao Fu is a partner with Fuguji LLC, an IT consulting firm specialized in ERP, data warehousing, business intelligence, and supply chain management. Prior to Fuguji LLC, he was a principal consultant with PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). At PwC Global Training Center, he was a solutions architect, as well as the lead instructor of SAP BW Technical Infrastructure (BWTI) class, where he was granted the Award of Excellence for his contributions to BWTI and other BW classes. He is an SAP Certified Technical Consultant and SAP Certified BW Consultant.

Henry Fu is a partner with Fuguji LLC, an IT consulting firm specialized in ERP, data warehousing, business intelligence, and supply chain management. He is an Oracle Certified Database Administrator and Oracle Certified Application Developer. He has been involved in the development and implementation of several large-scale data warehousing projects. He is a licensed professional engineer (Ontario, Canada), and has two M.S. degrees majoring in management science and engineering.

Book Objective

This book is a how-to guide. It uses step-by-step procedures with captured screen shots to illustrate SAP BW's functionalities. Although the book focuses on the core SAP BW technology, it also discusses other SAP technologies, such as Basis, ABAP (Advanced Business Application Programming), and ALE (Application Link Enabling) when necessary. It does not, however, discuss third-party reporting tools and BAPI (Business Application Programming Interface).

Intended Audience

This book is written for BW implementation teams and other individuals who need a product to understand the data warehousing concept.

Prerequisites

BW is built on the Basis 3-tier architecture and coded in the ABAP language. ALE and BAPI are used to link BW with SAP systems (R/3 or BW) and non-SAP systems.

This book, however, does not require readers have knowledge in these areas. Instead, BW has made the development of a data warehouse so easy that people with minimal experience in database design and computer programming can use it.

Book Structure

This book is organized into two parts:

• Part I contains guided tours. We start from a simplified business scenario, then illustrate how to create an InfoCube, load data into the InfoCube, check the accuracy of the loaded data, create queries to generate reports, and manage user authorization.
• Part II focuses on advanced topics, such as InfoCube design techniques, aggregates, multi-cubes, operational data store (ODS), Business Content, generic R/3 data extraction, data maintenance, performance tuning, and object transport.

The appendices introduce ASAP (Accelerated SAP) for BW, one of the derivatives of the ASAP implementation methodology developed by SAP, and give an overview of the Basis 3-tier architecture.

Conventions Used in This Book

High-Level Procedures

Most chapters are organized so that they present a high-level procedure for completing a particular task. For example, the contents of Chapter 2, Creating an InfoCube, are as follows:

• 2.1 Creating an InfoArea
• 2.2 Creating InfoObject Catalogs
• 2.3 Creating InfoObjects--Characteristics
• 2.4 Creating InfoObjects--Key Figures
• 2.5 Creating an InfoCube
• 2.6 Summary

Almost always, you can complete a task in many ways. In such cases, we will select a strategy that shows better logical dependency.

Work Instructions and Screen Captures

Each step in the high-level procedure involves many substeps. Whenever possible, we will use captured screen shots to illustrate these substeps.

Each screen is assigned a unique number, which is then used to reference the screen from other locations in the book. In this example, the screen number is 2.1, where "2" is the chapter number and "1" indicates that it is the first screen in that chapter.

Key words, such as RSA1 and Administrator Workbench, are shown in italic for easy distinction.

Caution: Due to the differences among BW releases and patches, the screens in your system may appear somewhat different from the screens illustrated in this book. BW is becoming more stable, so these differences should be small.

Transaction Codes

In SAP, transaction codes are the technical names of menu items or ABAP programs. Transactions can be used as shortcuts to screens we want to open. For example, to start Administrator Workbench, we can either (1) double-click the menu item Administrator Workbench or (2) type RSA1 in the transaction field and then click on the icon. The transaction field appears in the upper-left corner of a SAPGUI window.

To display transaction codes for all menu items, in Screen 2.1 select the menu item Extras/Setting, check the option Display technical names in the pop-up window as shown in Screen 0.1, and then click the check-box icon to continue.

To find the transaction code for a particular screen, select the menu item System/Status of the screen. The transaction code will be displayed in a field called Transaction.

Legends

BW implements good visual aesthetics. That is, different icons and their colors represent different objects and their status. If the legend icon is visible in a screen, clicking it enables us to see the meaning of each icon in that screen. Icons are also used to represent command buttons in BW.

Object Names and Descriptions

We can give any name to an object as long as the name does not exceed the length limit set by BW. This name, which is often referred to as the technical name, uniquely identifies an object.

BW prefixes the number 0 to the names of the objects delivered with Business Content. For this reason, we will begin our object names with an alphabetical letter.

The object description can be a free sentence.

Field Descriptions and F1 Help

To keep the description of each step in a procedure short and clear, we do not describe all fields or options in a screen. If needed, you can check the BW online documentation for more information. Perhaps even more convenient, you can select the field and then press the F1 function key to display an online help file.

Terminology

BW objects and terms encountered in each chapter are summarized in the last section of each chapter, not necessarily the first place we use these objects and terms.

For Further Information

A list of materials for further reading appears at the end of each chapter. To avoid duplication among chapters, here we give two very important resources that apply to SAP BW in general:

• SAP Library: Business Information Warehouse: The online documentation is delivered with the BW installation CDs.
• ASAP for BW Accelerators: Accelerators are documents, templates, tips, and tricks on specific topics. Their titles are listed in Appendix A, and the files can be downloaded from http://service.sap.com/bw/. An OSS (Online Service System) ID from SAP is required to access this Web site.