SAP BW* TLOGO Versioning in a Nutshell

Dear BW enthusiasts,

did you know there is a useful versioning feature in SAP BW since a long time? Here I would like to provide some key facts to understand, setup and use this feature.

First of all, the default customizing can be found the general customizing of your system (Tr. SPRO). There in the settings for Data Modeling (BW/4HANA) or within the General Settings (NetWeaver BW) you will find the option Create historical TLOGO versions automatically. This function maintains the customizing table RSTLOGOHISTCUST.

The initial customizing consists of only two records. These have following meaning:

1. Automatic version creation before export and after import for all (*) transportable BW object types (TLOGOs).
2. Any definition for a specific TLOGO overrules the first (*)-record:
   So for BW Queries (ELEM) this versioning is completely switched off by the second customizing record.

If you would like to create versions also during each activation for some TLOGOs, additional entries are required: In the example above (see “Enhance Versioning for certain TLOGOs”), versioning for object activation has been switched on additionally for ADSOs, InfoObjects, CompositeProviders and Transformations as well.

Attention: It is not recommended to switch the versioning off completely. It is okay to restrict the TLOGOs you would like to enable here, but make sure that versioning is on for InfoObjects (IOBJ). Unless you might run into challenges during changing ADSOs where the versioning is checked to decide whether remodeling is required or not.

In SAP BW 7.x, the versioning concept has been available for a long time in SAP GUI where you model the BW objects. For example, in the maintenance view of InfoCubes, there is the Version Management available from the standard menu.

Since mid of 2017, history versioning is also available in the BW Modeling Tools in a separate view called “History” for both BW 7.5 on HANA and BW/4HANA. There you see the full TLOGO history. Starting from the early 2020 releases, you can compare different versions or revert to older ones for ADSOs, CompositeProviders or InfoObjects in the BW Modeling Tools as well. If the History view is not available by default, you can open it via menu Window/Show View > Other … in the group called Version Control (Team).
Note: Versioning for BW Queries is not available.

From administration point of view there are two points to consider:

1. There is a dedicated authorization object S_RS_HIST to control what each user is allowed to do with the historical versions.
2. The versions are captured in the backend table RSOTLOGOHISTORY including timestamp, transport ID and User ID. This table can reach significant size depending on how the concept is used. For housekeeping purposes SAP provides report RSDG_DELETE_TLOGO_HISTORY.

Related SAP notes

• 2886009 – CompositeProvider: History version can not be opened in editor (endless loop)
• 2760770 – Revert (retrieve, restore) historical versions of BW objects
• 2637109 – Wrong timestamp displayed for active version in history view
• 2426069 – OutOfMemoryError in BWMT
• 2416068 – Support for historical versions for BW-MT objects (HCPR, IOBJ, ADSO, etc)
• 2248171 – RSOTLOGOHISTORY Cleanup Report

Thanks go to Christel for all details provided.