The Functioning of the SAP Business Warehouse

In SAP Business Warehouse, business users typically use an executive dashboard or a mobile app to access the platform through an application created by a developer. Users can also define data warehouse objects like data stores, queries, and data sources in SAP BW unlike other data warehousing solutions founded directly on database platforms. These are then managed in various ways depending on the systems they are running on and other limitations.

The Functioning of SAP Business Warehouse

By default, the SAP Business Warehouse is an exclusive model-driven ecosystem and hence unique to other data warehousing platforms. This means that the interface of the BW used by a developer can be used to define the data flow and storage of a data warehousing environment. BW also later handles the model on the database so that the processes of data ingestion, data transformation, and storage can be executed. This model of a business warehouse has gained a lot of popularity in the present-day cloud-based business environment.

Further, developers can log into the SAP GUI and use RSA1 and similar transaction codes to build data warehousing solutions. Comparatively, in other processes, SQL and stored procedures are used in a database management system.

In the near past, the goal of the SAP Business Warehouse has made a shift to open-source Eclipse and web-based tooling based on the SAP Fiori design language. The models that are in-built in these tools are implemented on a development system that is tested and moved to quality assurance and production systems.

Even before the SAP Business Warehouse was introduced, BW always operated on the SAP NetWeaver ABAP platform but was database inclined. Hence it worked on all databases that NetWeaver supported like Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, and IBM DB2. SAP BWstill runs on the NetWeaver ABAP platform but now requires the use of the HANA database. Even currently, many businesses still use the BW 7.5, on non-HANA databases.

There are both advantages and drawbacks to the SAP Business Warehouse. An advantage is that users have great flexibility to make changes to the platform as almost no development work is involved. The downside is that it is not easy to find developers as it is a proprietary toolkit.

SAP Business Warehouse continues to evolve and support additional data sources while offering modeling features like data aging and spatial and predictive processing.