What is an Extractor in SAP

SAP Extractor, previously known as the “BW Extractor” is a data management feature of SAP. It is typically used to recover volumes of data in SAP source systems to be stored in downstream data warehouses or business intelligence systems. The evolution of SAP Extractor was mainly to feed SAP BW applications. If you are an SAP customer who does not use BW, this feature enables you to integrate with an SAP Extractor.

What is SAP Extractor mainly used for?

It is a program in SAP ERP that can be activated to prepare and capture data through an extract structure for transferring to BW. The SAP Extractor can either be from a standard Data Source or a customized Data Source and details a full load or a delta load process of different types. The data transfer section of the program is remotely called from SAP BW. When the extractor is a delta type, it also runs to populate the delta queue with new and changed records. The data transfer remote call then transfers the data to SAP BW.

For extracting data from SAP and transferring it to the input layer of SAP Business Warehouse also called the Persistent Staging Area (PSA), it is necessary to define the load process with an Info Package in the scheduler. The data load process is triggered by a request IDoc to the source system when the Info Package is executed with the process chains being used for executions.

Types of SAP Extractor

There are 3 main types of SAP BW Extractors.

• Content Extractors (Application Specific). Used to extract BW content, FI, HR, CO, SAP CRM, LO cockpit

• Customer-Generated Extractors (Application Specific). Used for LIS, FI-SL, CO-PA

• Generic Extractors (Cross Application). They are based on DB View, Infoset, Function Modules

Using the SAP Extractor

Many extractors are application-specific and hard-coded for the Data Source delivered with the BI Content of the Business Warehouse.These extractors accurately complement and match the structure of the Data Source. Additionally, you can use various forms of SAP Extractor to extract data from SAP and move the data into BW. The SAP Extractor can auto manage and will know which data has to be extracted and which tables from where data has to be read-only after the generic extractor names the Data Source.

A user can also generically extract data with an SAP Extractor that includes master data attributes or texts, transaction data from all transparent tables, database views, or SAP query functional areas regardless of the application used. The Data Source data for these types are read generically and transferred to the BW.

What makes SAP Extractor such an optimized feature in SAP is that for many years (even now) SAP ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) product is just unbeatable. There are no other competitors such as Oracle, Microsoft, Salesforce that have been able to provide such an ERP system.

This is how SAP Extractor is used through generic extractors.