SAP BW on HANA Interview Questions

1. What is the time distribution option in update rule?

This is to distribute data according to time; for example if the source contains calendar week and the target contains calendar day, the data is spit for each calendar day. Here you can select either the normal calendar or the factory calendar.

2. What are the types of attributes?

Display only and navigational; display only attributes are only for display and no analysis can be done; navigational attributes behave like regular characteristics; for example assume that we have a customer characteristics with country as a navigational attribute; you can analyze the data using customer and country.

3. What are the steps to load non-cumulative cube?

• Initialize opening balance in R/3 (S278)
• Activate extract structure MCO3BFO for data source 2LIS_03_BF
• Set up historical material documents in R/3
• Load opening balance using data source 2LIS_40_S278
• Load historical movements and compress without marker update.
• Set up V3 update
• Load deltas using 2LIS_03_BF.

4. Can you partition a cube which has data already?

No; the cube must be empty to do this; one work around is to make a copy of the cube A to cube B; export data from A to B using export data source; empty cube A; create partition on A; re-import data from B; delete cube B.

5. What is an info source?

Group of logically related objects; for example the OCUSTOMER info source will contain data related to customer and attributes like customer number, address, phone no, etc.

6. How can you convert an info package group into the process chain?

You can convert package group into a process chain by double clicking on the info package group, then you have to click on the ‘ Process Chain Maint ‘ button where you have to type the name and description, this will insert individual info packages automatically.

7. How does SAP HANA support Massively Parallel Processing?

With availability of Multi-Core CPUs, higher CPU execution speeds can be achieved.

Also, HANA Column-based storage makes it easy to execute operations in parallel using multiple processor cores. In a column store data is already vertically partitioned. This means that operations on different columns can easily be processed in parallel. If multiple columns need to be searched or aggregated, each of these operations can be assigned to a different processor core.

In addition, operations on one column can be parallelized by partitioning the column into multiple sections that can be processed by different processor cores. With the SAP HANA database, queries can be executed rapidly and in parallel.

8. What is ad hoc analysis?

In traditional data warehouses, such as SAP BW, a lot of pre-aggregation is done for quick results. That is the administrator (IT department) decides which information might be needed for analysis and prepares the result for the end users. This results in fast performance but the end user does not have flexibility.

The performance reduces dramatically if the user wants to do analysis on some data that is not already pre-aggregated. With SAP HANA and its speedy engine, no pre-aggregation is required. The user can perform any kind of operations in their reports and does not have to wait hours to get the data ready for analysis.

9. What is B/W statistics and how it is used?

The sets of cubes delivered by SAP are used to measure performance for query, loading data etc. B/W statistics as the name suggests is useful in showing data about the costs associated with the B/W queries, OLAP, aggregative data etc. It is useful to measure the performance of how quickly the queries are calculated or how quickly the data is loaded into BW.

10. What is multi-provider in SAP BI? What are the features of Multi-providers?

Multi-provider is a type of info-provider that contains data from a number of info-providers and makes it available for reporting purposes.

• Multi-provider does not contain any data.
• The data comes entirely from the info providers on which it is based.
• The info-providers are connected to one another by union operations.
• Info-providers and Multi-providers are the objects or views relevant for reporting.
• A multi-provider allows you to run reports using several info-providers that are, it is used for creating reports for one or more than one info-provider at a time.