Understanding BW/4HANA – Part 1

This blog series covers my understanding of the SAP BW/4HANA Concepts, and will be a multi-part blog, as I learn, understand and implement it.

BW (Business Warehouse), is an Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW)

Below are some of the common terminologies / objects used in SAP BW

Infoarea,

• is like a folder used to group logically related objects for a particular business area or process
• Infoarea contains infobject catalogs, Infocubes, infoproviders
• Infoobject is contained in a infoobject catalog, which is contained within an infoarea

Infoobject Catalogs,

• Infoobject catalogs are a collection of infobjects, grouped according to application-specific criteria
• Infoobject catalog are of two types, Characteristic Infoobject Catalog and Keyfigures Infoobject catalog
• Infoobject catalogs are stored in a Infoarea
• One Infoobject can be part of more than one Infoobject catalog

Infoobjects,

• In BIBW, business evaluation objects are called as Infoobjects
• Infoobjects are of two types, Characteristics and Keyfigures
• Characteristics like Customer, Geography etc.
• Keyfigures like Sales Amount, Revenue, Profit
• Units currency, minute, hour, seconds, kgs
• Time characteristics like fiscal year, month, date and
• Technical characteristics like request number
• Infoobjects are smallest information unit in BI BW
• Infoobjects are the building blocks of the larger dataset
• Info Objects with attributes or texts can be either a pure data target or an Info Provider (if it is being reported).

Application Components

• Application components are used to organize the data sources
• They are similar to infoareas