Hello all,
I recently joined new project (a complete SAP shop). I’m in SAP ERP (which they call ECC) reporting team. I’ve never worked in any ERP system in my carrier as of yet. I’ve been doing SAP BI (BusinessObjects) from last 14 years, I can handle anything in BO :). I’ve not used any other SAP software other than Business Objects. But this SAP ECC (mainly BW (Business Warehouse)) is driving me crazy. It’s definitely sounds very interesting but extremely hard because of the terminology they use.
I’m trying to compare SAP BW terminology with Oracle (or any other RDBMS) but got no luck finding them. I don’t have hands on experience yet on BW so it’s a black box for me.
Here are some SAP ECC/BW terminologies that I can gather right now which I’m trying to compare with Oracle or any RDBMS so it’s easy for me to understand:
Infoarea
Infoobject
Characteristic
Key figure
DSO (Data Store Objects)
Infoset
Infocube
Multiprovider
Composite provider
Persistant layer
Virtual layer
I’ve read some online documentation but I keep trying to compare these in RDBMS so it’s easy to understand. So far I’ve not found anything to compare these with RDBMS.
Once we were trying to find a consultant who knows both parts SAP BO and SAP BI and is well familiar with classical DWH. We failed. Impossible. If a consultant is coming from BW world, then mostly he is functional consultant and can handle reporting with WebI, Lumira etc, but in most cases he knows nothing about star schema, database indexes , etc.
And the same vice versa - SAP Bo consultant does not know much about BW … can create cubes, queries etc, but not much about functional business.
I am in DWH and BI world for many years and when SAP acquired BO I started to learn BW, because i thought that BO will became nr 1 reporting tool, but in most cases this is not true. Explanation is very simple - it is much easier to create reporting with ABAP and now with SAP UI5, besides SAP consultants earn more compared to Bo / DWH. As BO consultant i can create cubes, queries, can do stuff with Solman, but I would not consider myself as a BW consultant, maybe only on junior level…
regarding definition of BW, i usually remove ‘Info’ from the object’s name and then this is more clear for me.
Keep in mind that a lot of things now has changed and old BW is not the same BW on Hana, even rsa1 is almost gone and modelling is completely different.
Also, I live/work in Europe and I got quite a lot of BW + Qlik consultant offers, bot classical BO, so SAP is loosing there
That’s so true. The other day there were some knowledge transfers taking place, and the BW architect (that’s what they call themselves) was explaining about AP/AR tables (seems like he knows tables too).
So I hear him saying like “There is a main table in the center which has numbers and amounts. There are few more tables (sometime you can call them dimensions) that will contain line items, header, date, aging… and have some link values to the main table. And he goes on and on…”
I did little online search and realized that he was talking about STAR Schema and seems like these AR/AP are Extended Start Schema in ECC/BW landscape. I was like omg… how the freaking hell you (being architect) teach or knowledge transfers like this? absolutely poor or lack of knowledge in the system. I feel like hey you know what if you show me those tables I can do wayyy… better job of explaining these damn relationship that you did, lol…
What you said here is exactly what I’m experiencing at my project.
I like your idea of understanding these terminology by removing “Info” from all, that’s funny but you know what it makes more sense though. Thanks!
Still searching… may be there is someone out there who may have initiated this terminology task
I will do it after one year of understanding this product.
(BOB member since 2006-09-28)