The migration of a SAP BW onto HANA seems to resolve all of the issues that have been creeping into SAP BW installations. Below we explore what this all means.
Key pain points for existing SAP BW customers
For many years customers have been successfully using SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW) as a datawarehousing solution for consolidation of data across the organisation, and subsequently establishing a “single version of the truth”. Using SAP BW, customers have built models and analysed their business data to support better decisions that improve customer satisfaction and aid better planning .
The combination of today’s technology changes and much tougher competition in market conditions is testing SAP BW in terms of flexibility, real-time capability, and efficient handling of mass data. In general SAP BW applications run on traditional data bases like Oracle, IBM, DB2, MS-SQL etc. which were originally designed for transactional workloads and were later adopted to data warehouse workloads. Since they were designed for transactional processing and not for analysis (OLAP) there are challenges for BW’s high-volume users, as illustrated below:
- Data load times: The daily loads that extract from source systems takes a huge amount of time, sometimes with a one day latency in reporting. All the aggregations, activations and internal calculations happening in the application server lead to long times for loading data in to the targets.
- Query response times: The execution of queries for large amounts of data is very slow, which in turn results in delays for quick decision making.
- No real time data: It is not possible for managers to take instant, competetive decisions on real -time data in regular BW systems.
- Structural changes: Any changes to a report or data model will take a long time since there are lots of layers to be re-designed. This means that consumers of the reports have to wait too long for their required changes to be made to the delivery of the source data upon which their decisions are being made.
Why migrate to BW on HANA ?
Because you will be amazed at the increased response times!
SAP BW is one of the first applications to be optimised and powered by HANA. If you are one among the 15000+ customers running your data warehouse solution with SAP BW, and are facing problems with query response times, delayed daily overnight loads, or data latency, this is the right time to migrate to BW on HANA. Avail yourself of the benefits of in-memory capabilities, flexible data modelling , high speed data loads and also real time reporting.
Is the journey un-disrupted ?
Absolutely yes, you need not worry about your current SAP BW application because it remains the same. It is just the database that will be replaced by SAP HANA. All the data models which were running prior to migration can still be used without having to rewrite application logic, queries, MultiProviders, and data transformations from DSOs to InfoCubes.
The picture below shows that all Planning, OLAP and Data Management is pushed down to HANA (Database level) after migration.
Image source: https://open.sap.com/courses/bwhana1/items/2i7iYfhtkBNWCAeqA1skNH#247
When is the best time to migrate?
The answer is whenever you want. SAP BW customers can immediately migrate to BW on HANA to avail themselves of these benefits. There are certain pre-requisites, like
- the BW system should be Unicode,
- the ABAP and JAVA stack must be on separate severs (no Dual Stack),
- BW version must be at least 7.0 – if BW version is below this level then a two-stage upgrade is mandatory.
Please refer to SAP Note 1729988 – SAP NetWeaver BW powered by SAP HANA – Checklist Tool.
What is different with SAP BW powered by SAP HANA
SAP HANA underneath SAP BW accelerates data loads, reporting performance and planning processes.
- Existing objects and processes are pushed down to SAP HANA by using SAP-HANA optimised objects
- New functions are available in SAP BW, based on platform capabilities of SAP HANA
- Innovations in SAP BW can be aligned and optimised directly for SAP HANA
Key Benefits to customers using SAP BW on HANA
Preserve your BW investment: As the migration is completely without disruption the BW application remains the same – just faster queries, updates and reporting. No modifications in developments and no end user training is required since it is without disruption.
Supercharge your current BW: With excellent query performance and faster reporting, businesses can now take decisions with most up to date information. Moreover data loads are faster with decreased data latency.
Improved decision making: Since the data loads will be faster it means faster query execution and faster analysis – and snap decisions.
Real-Time insight as Business happens: With the enablement of near real time reporting in BW on HANA , it is possible to do analysis and take decisions on the most up to date information.
Unlock the power of your data: With self sevice access ALL information at the most granular level to better understand details of business and understand the hidden patterns .
Simplified Maintenance: With BW on HANA database management is not required (No index, no aggregates, no Statistics and DBA operations) because the performance is already achieved by HANA as a database.
Minimum wait time for changes: Changes in business requirements can be handled more efficiently and with good quick turn around time.
How to migrate to BW on Hana?
Gauri can provide the safe pair of hands you need to advise on, plan and manage your BW migration to HANA. Contact us – we are here to help.
