What is mySAP Business Warehouse

The first question while starting to learn SAP BW (Business Warehouse) is what Business Warehouse itself is.

If we talk about Business Informastion Warehouse, we can not avoid talking Data Warehouse because Business Warehouse is Data warehouse solution developed by SAP. The SAP BW system is an enterprise-wide information hub, which allows us to analyse data from R/3 and non-R/3 application and present it in an Excel-Based user interface. SAP BW enables us to analyze data from operative SAP Application, from others business application and external data sources such as databases, outline services or may be from internet. To circumvent the numerous disadvantages associated with reporting in the ERP system; data storage, management and reporting takes place on a separate server called the SAP BW Server.

Before continue, it is better if we learn data warehouse first. Refering to W.H. Inmon in book “Building the Data Warehouse,” 1996 page 371; data warehouse definition is “A collection of integrated, subject-oriented databases designed to support DSS (Decision Support System) function, where each unit of data is relevant to some moment in time.”
Another definition can be seen on “The Data Warehouse Toolkit,” by R. Kimbal, 1996 page 310. On the book, Kimbal define that data warehouse is “A copy of transaction data specifically structured for query and analysis.”

Why companies need a data warehouse?

The reporting, analysis, and interpretation of business data is of central importance to a company in guaranteeing its competitive edge, optimizing processes, and enabling it to react quickly and in line with the market. Company data is usually spread across several applications that are used for entering data. Analyzing this data is not only difficult because it is spread across several systems but because the data is saved in a form that is optimized for processing, not analysis.

Data analysis represents additional system load which affects operative data processing. Furthermore, the data has come from heterogeneous applications and is therefore only available in heterogeneous formats which must first be standardized. The applications also only save historic data to a limited extent. This historic data can be important in analysis.

Therefore separate systems are required for storing data and supporting data analysis requirements. This type of system is called a data warehouse. A data warehouse serves to integrate data from heterogeneous sources, transform, consolidate, clean up and store this data, and stage it efficiently for analysis and interpretation purposes.

As a data warehouse system, a SAP BW (Business Information Warehouse) need a separate server for storing data too.  How to design architecture of SAP BW, I should learn it first. See you next time.

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