SAP BW: A Step-by-Step Guide: A Step-by-Step Guide

Product Author Bios

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.

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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® BW information systems professionals will gain both the general understanding and specific skills necessary to create high quality data warehouses that support effective decision making.

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Online Sample Chapter

Data Warehousing and SAP BW

Table of Contents

(NOTE: Each chapter concludes with a Summary.)

Preface.


Acknowledgments.

I. GUIDED TOURS.

II. ADVANCED TOPICS.

Preface

Book Objective

This book is a how-to guide. It uses step-by-step procedures with screen captures to illustrate SAP BW functionalities. This book focuses on the core SAP BW technology. It discusses other SAP technologies, such as Basis, ABAP (Advanced Business Application Programming), and ALE (Application Link Enabling) when necessary. It will not discuss 3rd-party reporting tools and BAPI (Business Application Programming Interface).

Intended Readers

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

Prerequisites

BW is built on Basis 3-tier architecture and coded in 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. BW has made the development of a data warehouse so easy that people with experience in database design and computer programming can use it.

Book Structure

As shown in the table of contents, this book is organized into two parts:

Part I contains guided tours. We start from a simplified business scenario, then go on to illustrates how to create an InfoCube, load data into the InfoCube, check accuracy of the loaded data, create queries to generate reports, and finally how to manage user authorization.

Part II contains advanced topics. There we discuss InfoCube design techniques, aggregates, multi-cubes, operational data store (ODS), Business Content, generic R/3 data extraction, data maintenance, performance tuning, and object transport.

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

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Index

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Index