Expert Insight: What is SAP BW/4HANA?

BW/4HANA is the next best thing for Business Warehousing from the house of SAP. The whole suite has been customized on every level to be compatible with SAP HANA. The BW/4HANA code can be executed on SAP HANA, since it is intermeshed with SAP HANA libraries and engines. Here, the ABAP component consists of millions of lines of code which is actually dwarfed by BW on HANA. It is also free from restrictions such as staying within the “common denominator scope” of SQL such as OpenSQL or SQL92, but it can also be successfully combined with any optimal combination with the rest of what SAP HANA has to offer. SAP HANA is especially noteworthy in this scenario as it stretches into the Big Data world through SAP HANA VORA, which is an asset which will be used a lot by BW/4HANA.

 Now, getting down to the Unique Selling Proposition of BW/4HANA in its multi-fold nature, there are various selling points that aim to power the development of BW/4HANA:

1. Simplicity

Based on how a person would count them, BW provides its users with at least 10-15 varying object types such as InfoCube building blocks to construct a data warehouse. BW/4HANA has around four such building blocks which are as expressive and powerful as well as the pre-existing 15. But it is worth noting that the building blocks of BW/4HANA are more flexible in nature. These days, Data models can be constructed with fewer components used for building while the expressiveness remains untouched. Hence, they will be more convenient and simple to handle their maintenance. Current and pre-existing models can be improved, changed and therefore can be kept relevant ad “alive” for longer periods of time, going well beyond the initial scope.

Moving on to the next valuable BW/4HANA asset is its awareness of the type of data allocated and present in any table. It can then extrapolate the data required automatically in terms of the type of data that needs to sit in the memory called hot store, along with the data that can be placed in the warm store nothing but the disk or the non-volatile RAM. This will yield relatively more economic hardware usage. This is native to BW/4HANA when contrasted with manually created data warehouses that also need a manually created data life-cycle management.

2. Openness

BW/4HANA provides a managed approach to data warehousing meaning the provision of pre-fabricated templates or building blocks for constructing data warehouses in a standardized manner. Such provisions facilitate massive opportunities to enhance the resultant SAP HANA models with respect to footprint, performance and data life-cycle.

When compared with conventional BW, it is made possible to stray from the conventional approach whenever required and is deemed appropriate. BW/4HANA models and their data can be displayed as SAP HANA views which can be accessed through standard SQL.  BW/4HANA security is therefore not compromised just because of the SAP HANA views. But on the flip side, any SAP HANA view or table can be simply and quite directly incorporated into BW/4HANA. Therefore, replication of data is deemed redundant. Both the aforementioned capabilities signify that BW/4HANA integrates easily with and even complements any given native SQL data warehousing approach. You can also consider SAP BW/4HANA has a dominant suite of tools for designing a data warehouse on SAP HANA with each its unique option to integrate with other SQL-based tools.

3. Modern UIs

BW/4HANA being a new product in general means that it is offering modern UIs for purposes of monitoring, admin and data modelling which is run in SAP HANA Studio or even a browser. The midterm will see the SAP GUI going obsolete in that regard. Likewise SAP’s Digital Boardroom, Lumira, SAP BusinessObjects Cloud along with Analysis for Office and Design Studio will be the ideal counterpart as analytic clients atop BW/4HANA.

4. High Performance

Right from the get-go, SAP HANA has seen excellent performance from BW. As discussed above, The BW/4HANA entity will exist free of any baggage and will use any and every enhanced access to SAP HANA which will be particularly exciting with regard to Big Data scenarios. This is because SAP HANA VORA provides a highly enhanced bridge between Hadoop/SPARK and SAP HANA- RDBMS.  All customers need to optimize and add to the existing data warehouses with detailed scenarios that take care of data categories that go well beyond conventional OLTP data – mainly IoT or machine generated data and social networks which represent manual information sources.

Go through our Top SAP BW/4HANA Interview Questions to crack your next interview.

Conclusion

BW/4HANA is a highly versatile tool created with the intent of taking BW processes into the future in terms of speed, efficiency and precision. Any enterprises looking to enhance their BW capabilities should look into BW/4HANA as a long term solution.

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