Mass cube writer – Faster writing to Flat Cubes

Summer is about to start, and my advice for this time of year is: “Take a rest; a field that has reseted gives a bountiful crop.”

But before you go for your summer holidays, maybe you can try the mass cube writer.

If you are still not running BW on HANA but you are using Flat Infocubes (see the link for the Pre-requisites) you may have been missing one simple configuration via parameter that can make the loads to your flat Infocubes faster.

How much faster? Off course that depends on many factors, but check this results to get an idea.

The scenario:

System: BW 7.40 with IBM DB2 10.5

Source: Columnar DSO; I mention columnar because these DSOs are faster, which guarantees that the system can deliver the data to the cube as fast as needed; this is specially important if you are running the DTP with 10 parallel processes.

Transformation: 1 to 1 for all fields from DSO to cube (no start or end routines).

Data: 4.5 million records, with one characteristic (document number, in the classical cube it uses a line item dimension) with 1 million distinct values, and two  others (not as line item dimension in the classical cube) with approximately 0.8 million distinct values. All the rest of the characteristics have less than 100 distinct values.

Number of parallel processes for the DTP: 10

Package size: 50.000 records.

The results:

Switching from a classical cube to a flat cube reduced the load time from 22 minutes to 6,8 minutes, as you can see an significant improvement. Turning on the mass cube writer reduced the write time even further, from 6,8 to 4,5 minutes.

Remember that flat cubes also perform better when reading (running queries) but that is a topic for another post.

For enabling the Mass cube writer (which means just setting one parameter), follow the instructions provided in Note:  1637069 – Orange : Mass Cube Writer as default for loading into cubes

Enjoy your summer!