SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, BW bridge - Value Proposition

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SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, SAP BW bridge is a function enhancement of SAP Data Warehouse Cloud. And, it provides a path to the public cloud for SAP BW 7.3 to SAP BW/4HANA customers with the benefit of BW capabilities available natively in SAP Data Warehouse Cloud.

Figure 1: SAP Data Warehouse Cloud Architecture

Source : SAP Data Warehouse Cloud L2 Public 2022-01.ppt

Currently, reaping the full benefits out of SAP’s data warehousing offerings requires customers to run both SAP BW/4HANA and SAP Data Warehouse Cloud. However, with the introduction of the SAP BW bridge enhancement, it is possible for customers to merge these offerings into a single data warehouse solution in the public cloud.

Figure 2: Single data warehouse in the cloud

Source : SAP Help Portal : SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, SAP BW bridge

The value proposition can therefore be split into two main components:

a) SAP Data Warehouse Cloud

• SAP Data Warehouse Cloud is a pure cloud product offered as a Software as a Service and is an In-Memory data warehouse fully managed by SAP.


• It is scalable, elastic, open and flexible making it suitable for any company of any size. This means that, for example, if the customers computing or storage needs change, the cloud can be quickly scaled up or down – no setup or installation is necessary. And you only pay for what you use.


• It is an open product that can connect to many data sources (on-premise or in the cloud).

It offers a variety of ways to collect and connect with data:

• Virtualization enables a real-time virtual data access to various source systems. In this scenario, data is left in the source (not moved and duplicated) and only accessed remotely when needed.


• Replication lets you transfer data in real-time or in a scheduled manner for high-speed access to data that may have large volumes or reside in sources which offer less access speed.


• Third-party APIs allow external data movement tools like SAP Data Intelligence and others to connect and bring data out of a variety of sources into SAP Data Warehouse Cloud.

Figure 3: Data Sources overview

Source : SAP Data Warehouse Cloud L2 Public 2022-01.ppt

• It is the only cloud data warehouse solution designed for both IT and line of business users. At the heart of business empowerment and collaboration is the concept of “spaces.” For business users, spaces are “dedicated working spaces” to model and analyze data. For IT, spaces consist of compute and storage resources that can be allocated for a specific project or team. Each space is isolated from the others and has its own  storage and compute resources, metadata objects, connections and users.

 

   Figure 4: Spaces

Source : SAP Data Warehouse Cloud L2 Public 2022-01.ppt

As a result

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  • Business reliance on IT diminishes as end-users can do more on their own - With easy access to data sources, a business catalog, and intuitive data modeling and visualization tools, users can access, discover and analyze data independently.
  
  
  • Business collaboration improves. When insights are shared, all authorised recipients gain access to the same version of the truth, enhancing communication between stockholders, consensus building, and data trust.
  
  
  • IT and data experts can focus on more complex analytics scenarios and become more responsive to the business's needs.
  
  
  
  

 

• SAP and its partners deliver pre-built Business content to help jump-start the implementation of scenarios and lead to rapid value realization with out-of-the-box data flows and models.

Figure 5: Scope of Business Content.

 

The content consists of data models, transformations, calculations, and analyses for a variety of industry- and Line of Business-specific use cases.

Figure 6: Example content for SAP Ariba

 

 

 

b) With the SAP BW bridge enhancement, SAP BW capabilities are also available in SAP Data Warehouse Cloud

• The connectivity and business content for SAP BW-based data integration (extractors) from SAP ECC and S/4HANA. The Business Content enables quick and cost-effective implementation as it provides a model that can be used as a guideline during implementation and specifically designed to leverage the SAP HANA capabilities in SAP BW bridge following a consistent EDW reference architecture called LSA++ (Layered Scalable Architecture).

Figure 7: SAP BW bridge Business Content

Source : SAP BW/4 HANA Content

 

Summary of benefits include:

• SAP‘s time, knowledge & experience (over 20 years) combined to deliver out-of-box pre-packaged analytical content that is aligned with the business processes in SAP such as S/4HANA and ECC.


• Complete content for SAP business areas including all processes to acquire data, transform, harmonize, store, model & prepare for multi-dimensional analysis.


• Pre-defined and integrated Data Models, Data Flows, Composite Provider, Advanced DSOs (ADSO),etc.


• Large number of complex technical features like Routines, Transformations, Conversion exits, Metrics, etc are readily available to be re-used to quickly build custom design to suit business needs.


• The content provides over 11,300 objects worth 30000+ man days of work that are ready to use; saves time for developer to focus on building the complex model & the analytics for specific business requirements.

 

Figure 8: Example Dataflow content for Purchasing

Source : SAP BW/4 HANA Content

• Using ODP/ODQ framework the data is supplied to multiple subscribers using a single extraction and delta queue process so that source systems does not bear the frequent load of extractions impacting their performance.


• Push & pull delta mechanisms Full & Delta (CDC) loads in-built within the SAP Datasources that sends only the most relevant information to target; a very complex process that can take many man days to re-create.


• The SAP BW functionality for loading data with partitioning, monitoring, and error handling, all tailored to the needs of your company.


• Database tables created for DataStore objects and InfoObjects with property 'high cardinality' are partitioned on the database by default. However, you can maintain additional options for database partitioning in the advanced DSO.

Figure 9: Partitioning advanced DSO feature

 

• Semantic groups are available in SAP BW bridge replacing the object type of semantically partitioned objects (SPO) of the past. It is a tool used to generate a group from the semantically related advanced DataStore objects. Using semantically partitioned data models, groups offer the following advantages when compared with individual advanced DSOs :
  
  
  
  • Better performance with mass data. Semantic partitioning means that the data sets are distributed over several data containers. Runtimes are kept short, even if the data volume is large.
  
  
  • Working with different time zones. With a semantically partitioned data model, the time zones can be separated by the partitions. Data loading and administrative tasks can therefore be scheduled independently of the time zone.
  
  
  
  


• There a various monitoring functions available in SAP BW bridge:
  
  
  
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    • During the data transfer process, the DTP monitor app allows you to keep track of the data load. The app is available in the BW bridge Cockpit.
    
    
    • In order to automate data loads in SAP BW bridge, processes are compiled into process chains. The processes are scheduled in the background. Each process can trigger one or more events, which trigger further processes. In the Process Chain Monitor app, you can see the process chains with monitoring information. The app is available in the BW bridge Cockpit.
    
    
    
    
  
  
  
  

Figure 10: Process chain monitoring

 

• The Processes app allows you to monitor incorrect or long-running processes and allow troubleshooting in the case of processes that are terminated.


• In the data transfer process (DTP) in SAP BW bridge you can set up error handling. A DTP is an object that determines how data is transferred between two persistent objects (source and target) in the SAP BW bridge system.
  
  
  
  • With the first option, updating is terminated for the entire data package, and the error is reported as a package error in the DTP monitor.
  
  
  • With the second option, the records with errors are written to a data transfer intermediate storage where they are edited and can be updated manually using an error DTP and request status is set to red.
  
  
  • With the third option, the records with errors are written to a data transfer intermediate storage where they are edited and can be updated manually using an error DTP but the request status is set to green.
  
  
  
  

Figure 11: Error handling options in DTP

 

Conclusion

With SAP Date Warehouse Cloud, SAP BW bridge, existing SAP BW customers can continue to utilise their BW skills and benefit from the additional features made available in SAP Data Warehouse Cloud.