Creating an ADSO from Open ODS view

The Open ODS View, one of SAP BW 7.4’s main enhancements and one of the strategic modeling objects for SAP BW on HANA in SAP’s simplification approach (see  SAP BW 7.4 SP8 powered by SAP HANA and Roadmap | SCN and What’s new in SAP NW BW 7.4 SP8 ).

One of the key features of the Open ODS view is developing BW objects, without having actual data persistency in SAP BW. The Open ODS View reads data from a remote source, while leveraging BW functionality such as Master data access when working with InfoObjects. The great thing about this, is that the SAP BW developer can actually start developing, testing and prototyping on data, before having to worry about the underlying data model, changes in requirements etc. it really supports agile development and provides more flexibility in projects.

In a lot of situations though, there will come a certain point in your project where data persistence is required, and a traditional ETL process will need to come in place. That’s where the Advanced DSO (ADSO) comes into play. From SAP BW 7.4 SP8, it is now possible to actually generate an Advanced DSO from your existing Open ODS view, inheriting all InfoObject assignments and field information. When used on an SAP ERP Datasource, it even creates a transformation to that Datasource and a Data Transfer Process.

An example:

I created a basic generic extractor on table AUFK in SAP ECC, and create a simple Open ODS View of type FACT, without associations to other Open ODS Views or InfoObjects.

After checking and activating, Data preview shows us about 6417 rows (demo system 🙂 )

Them, in the RSA1 modeling workbench, we go into change mode for this Open ODS View, and select the ‘Generate Dataflow’  option. Clicking this button opens a dialog with settings for the dataflow generation. We choose the ADSO name here, and we can choose between source object data types for the fields, or for BW types. Since both are ABAP systems in this case, we just go for source system types.

After successful completion of the process, we now have an Advanced DSO and corresponding data flow leading up to this ADSO! (Infopackage has to be created manually)

Loading and activating data shows us the same 6417 data records we had using the Open ODS View, but now persistent in BW. The data is exactly identical to the data we previewed with the Open ODS View earlier: