You are on page 1of 1

2/25/2019 “BW on HANA … Now What?

” (Part 1 of 3) | SAP Blogs

virtual layer still has a purpose in decoupling the data model from the report to maximize exibility towards
future data model changes. But the cube layer has lost its purpose. Hence, no more cubes!

Another darling of BW veterans that may become obsolete in the future: infoobjects. You may have become
fond of these little rascals with theirs attributes and their texts and their nine character de nition limit, but wait
until you need to build a couple of hundreds of them for a big model on non-SAP data. I can’t say I will miss
them much. SAP is probably thinking the same thing, as in the newest BW objects – “Open ODS Views” and
“Composite Providers” – infoobject are not a necessity anymore. You can just work with the eld names from
the source system with no restrictions with

eld de nitions being copied automatically. Some master data can be added later. Not as rich as infoobject
functionality, but good enough for simple data models and PoCs. You can build “data ows” in BW using these
new objects only, and build a report on top using the eld names of the source system. No more infoobjects?

Data ows between asterisks, as these is no physical data owing inside the virtual data ows. But why is it so
important to get rid of the data as much as possible? Not because of data duplication, as data storage is cheap.
Why then?

“The Horror of Data Loading”


Compared with the popularity of SAP ERP – worldwide market leader since the Stone Age – the BW data
warehousing solution is surprisingly unpopular. Reasons mentioned are lack of agility and bad performance, but
in my view the main reason for BW’s unpopularity is lack of data integrity caused by “The Horror of Data
Loading”. Please take a look at another picture shown below. It depicts a typical data ow in BW with ve layers,
four of which contain data: Acquisition (raw data), Propagation (prepared for consumption), BTL or Business
Transformation Layer (business rules applied), and a cube for reporting.

https://blogs.sap.com/2016/09/04/bw-on-hana-now-what-part-1-of-3/ 4/8

You might also like