NLS at SAP BW

[Former Member]

NLS at SAP BW

At 1930 first FIFA world cup final Uruguay Vs Argentina , The Uruguay had made a change in team by replacing Castro with Anselmo due to his health failure .

Now in 24^th June 2014 FIFA world cup Uruguay’s Luis Suarez has officially charged with biting Italy defender Giorgio Chiellini in the match.

Does both the information are not attractive for FIFA fans?

Now if you think both are important then let’s think about the business data and see how much historical data are spread across and giving us value?  Answer will be yes both historical and current data are giving value.

So is that meaning I should retain all the data (Historical & Current data) as they are adding value?  Once again the answer is yes.

But over a period of time the storage system/database has taken a generation transformation along with revolution of hardware- SAP HANA and it’s costly to store all the data here and as well the legacy database has similar challenges along with deteriorating performance.

Will the traditional way of archiving the data into unplugged device and retaining offline and once again connecting on need basis after complex retrieval logic add the same value given the time and cost in mind. No.

Then how should manage it? The answer is Near line storage, it is nothing but a storage between Primary storage, frequently accessed data in a 24 X 7 environment and offline storage, removable media such as tape. It has many advantages from database space reduction, Cost effective storage, Faster & Less complex access to data…..

There are few SAP certified vendors to implement Near line storage along with different solutions.

http://www.sap.com/partners/overview.html

Here I would like to emphasis the Sybase – IQ as an optimal NLS solution and it’s a self-implementable. The Sybase IQ is tightly integrated with SAP BW and it comes along with adapters for near line solution and as well the data can be read directly by traditional BEx queries without any complex logic or data reload.

http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-54468

Here goes an idea on SAP BW environment to manage all the type of data.

Data need to be categorized by Information life cycle according to importance/Age and its volatility as Hot (Frequently accessed & Updated), Warm (Accessed at low frequency & Minimum update), Cold (Rarely accessed & No update), Frozen (Very Rarely accessed/Record purpose & No update)

Over this categorization the data can be stored at different storage to build a single Infoprovider at BW environment.

•      Hot data can be stored in SAP HANA Main Memory.
•      Warm data can be stored in SAP HANA Disk Memory.
•      Cold data can be stored  in Sybase-IQ
•      Frozen data can be stored in Offline storage – Hard disk, Tape…