I want to take this opportunity to announce the publication of a new HowTo paper on Archiving of PSA data in SAP NetWeaver BI.
Data volumes in the entry layer (Persistent Staging Area - PSA) of the SAP BI systems are very often heavily increasing over time. But since the data might be needed for further requirements and / or can not be re-loaded from the original source systems, it can not be deleted from the SAP BI system for good. For data targets like InfoCubes and DataStore Objects, the standard feature of Archiving in BI can be used to delete the data from the SAP BI system and reload it on demand, and hence reducing the required data base sizes for these objects. Yet PSA data cannot be archived with this feature.
If you want to archive the data from the PSA of the SAP BI system, you have basically three options:
- Create a proper (additional) entry layer in the SAP BI system. This layer would typically consist of DataStore Objects, which can be archived using the standard BI archiving features. For detailed information on how to create such a layer (or a layered scalable architecture), please refer to the existing literature about this topic and Enterprise Data Warehousing.
- There exist solutions to archive the PSA data by some of the 3rd party software vendors. For details on these solution and vendors, please check with the respective vendors directly. An overview of SAP's partners can be obtained from http://www.sap.com/ecosystem/customers/directories/searchpartner.epx
- If none of the above solutions apply or they are not feasible, you can implement the solution described in the new HowTo paper http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/go/portal/prtroot/docs/library/uuid/a0974515-7225-2b10-14a1-f5abba35b... (SDN --> Business Intelligence --> HowTo Guides --> How to Archive PSA Data in SAP NetWeaver BI).
