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Author's profile photo Tammy Powlas

Turn Back Time – Looking back at TechEd 2007 BI Bootcamp

My first TechEd was in 2007.  Before that, I mostly attended ASUG events such as ASUG forums and once in a while ASUG Annual Conference.  Back then, I never felt I was technical enough to attend.  I was wrong.

My first day at TechEd 2007 was a BI Bootcamp ASUG pre-conference session.  I found my notes while cleaning off an old PC.  Read below:

SAP TechEd

BI Boot Camp

October 1, 2007

BI Upgrades (now known as BW)

Ron Silberstein, SAP NetWeaver RIG

When upgrading to 7.0, SAP supports a “coexistence” strategy except with BI Statistics content – that is only available on 7.0.  BIA – Business Information Accelerator is a big driver for the upgrade. 

The focus of the upgrade is on Basis procedures.  Some core steps:

  • Project Prep
  • Technical Prep
  • Technical Upgrade – Prepare
  • Post technical steps
  • Statistics

Ron is publishing an upgrade paper on SDN with a sample project timeline.

Usage types drive need for the front end.  BI Java, EP, AS-Java.

Technical steps of upgrade 2 options, one where users can stay on the system, the other users are out of the system:

  • PREPARE – can run one week ahead of time
  • SAPUp – downtime

End time is shorter if the users are out of the system and dataloads are stopped.   Application Specific Upgrade (ASU) toolbox is available in December through Solution Manager.

BIA only works on InfoCubes; query response times are 100X faster.  BIA is an appliance.  Index is on rows and columns (instead of just rows).  BIA has 2 blade CPU’s. 

 
 

BIA at Wawa

John Langan, SAP

Wawa used 7.0 from the start; this was not an upgrade.

Uses Analysis Process Designer

They have thousands of broadcasts to the portal each day

570 Stores do not have e-mail, and no Excel

They have 600 active queries

BIA is a transparent bolt on application that uses TREX to boost query performance.

It has a common index for master data.

It uses Delta indexing

Wawa has a two terabyte warehouse

Logical partitioning

Average 2 years on Accelerator, older will use aggregates

Has 1 BIA index per cube

Rollup times are reduced

Change run is less work

BIA has a new process type

They are running BIA on 5 C class blades (4 are running, 1 is a failover)

Standalone TREX is installed

 
 

BI Roadmap

Ingo Brenckmann, SAP Product Strategist

Roadmap is for 3-5 years

By 2010 want a “process-centric” BI, where BI is part of the business process

Respond to change

BI is complex

  • Has multiple tools
  • Steep learning curve
  • There is a disconnect between business and IT, with fragmented information
  • Disconnect between analytics and operations

BI is a management discipline focused on analyzing business activities to augment business processes with actionable intelligence

Embed analytics in composite applications

Future there will be three major lines of BI:

  1. Standard Reporting
    1. Create queries
    2. Publish to Web
  2. Agile BI
    1. Create new analytics
    2. Explore information
    3. Plan business activities
  3. Embedded BI
    1. Embed BI
    2. Create dashboards

Future direction is human centric

Three design principles of an agile BI structure:

  1. simplicity for the users
  2. flexibility
  3. integration

Embedded BI

Only SAP provides

Uses Enterprise Services

Integrate BI into business processes

Create reusable BI components

Uses Composite Applications

Visual Composer to create information dashboards and to personalize content

Detailed view on Embedded BI

From an “embedded BI dashboard” can jump to standard reports or to Agile BI

Can access BI from Enterprise Search

Enhanced backend to reduce time of development

Transformations

Test tool

Copy transformations

Find attributes

Context Menu in Data Flow

Enhanced alert handling

Process chain dependency management

2009 – access BI from MS Office

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End of notes.

How far have we com since 2007?  Embedded BI now means something else in SAP.

If you have read this far, please consider submitting an abstract for an ASUG session at SAP TechEd.  Here is the link to submit.

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