2/25/2019 “BW on HANA … Now What?

” (Part 1 of 3) | SAP Blogs

Now that’s a good term: “data-integration platform”. Let’s use that instead of “data warehouse”, since we aim at
storing as little data as possible. Storing data physically is nowadays called “persistency” and it should be an
exception (… for historic data, “snapshots” and data from systems without direct access coupling; I will address
this in part 3). Strive for max. one persistent layer for data from tables that are not already in the box, and no
persistent layers at all for tables inside the box. Virtual layers yes, and with purposes quite comparable to the
ones in a traditional data warehouse: raw data, data prepared for consumption by other data ows, data
prepared for reporting.

No more cubes! No more infoobjects? No

more data??
For data warehousing veterans it may come as a shock, but multidimensional models – commonly known as
cubes – are no longer required. Cleverly designed cubes with properly chosen facts, dimensions and master
data were once an absolute necessity for reporting with acceptable performance. Not anymore. Column-based
database technology doesn’t need it, and doesn’t use it. Cubes are immediately attened by the BW on HANA
technology. This is tremendously good news for owners of a data warehouse lled with badly designed cubes.
There is clearly no point in developing any new cubes after migration to the HANA database. In practice, this
comes down removing a complete layer in the data warehouse. Usually, the top three layers are a table layer
consisting of “Data Store Objects” (DSO), a reporting layer consisting of cubes and a virtual layer consisting of
“multiproviders”. Most if not all data-transformations already took place in the data ow below the DSO. The

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