BW or No BW

[former_member472435]

Dear Experts,

My client is a growing organization which is currently using My SQL as data warehouse.

Source systems are SAP ECC 6.0 (FICO module only), CRM (ticketing system only),

Hybris and other 3rd party systems. They wish to move to SAP platform for data warehousing.

What should be the defining factor for choosing BW/4 HANA or Native HANA (Enterprise/Platform edition) in general for a greenfield case ?

Regards,

Mihir

[Jan_van_Ansem]

As Tammy says, it does depend on the business case.
There are more considerations than business content.
BW is very good at managing complex data warehouse processes really well. Think about the use of InfoObjects (which gives you the support for analysis authorisations, hierarchies, time dependent master data, multi language texts) ADSO's, process chains... just to name a few. Some of these functions are rapidly being build in HANA Data Warehouse Foundation (native (NDSO's, DW task scheduler and monitor) these are not as rich in functionality and as mature as BW's functions.
If robustness and ease of maintenance and control is of key importance for your business case, BW/4HANA is probably the better choice. If your business case is more about being agile, and using HANA as a platform for more than just Enterprise Data Warehousing, then HANA native is probably a better choice.

Your question about real-time data extraction from ECC6 on Oracle to HANA native: If you would go HANA native then it would probably make more sense to use SDI instead of Data Services, unless your organisation has a big footprint in Data Services already. I would verify the real-time requirement - usually for Data Warehousing 'near real time' is good enough so SDI with regular intervals (10 minutes, hourly?) would work.Or you can go down the route of virtual integration through SDA for some of your data.

[former_member472435]

Hi Jan Van Ansem,

Thank you for your detailed response. Just to add, 80% of the data is residing in non-ABAP based systems. Hence according to me, we wont be able to take full toll of business content.

SAP has given one recommendation to the client. That is to use HANA platform edition (not enterprise edition with comes with SLT and SDI features) and in combination with SAP data services (no BW recommended). SAP knows real or near real time reporting in needed. They have said data services can be used for both real time/new real time and batch mode. Till date I knew data services is not meant for real time replication but strong data transformation capabilities. But technologies are evolving on daily basis.

In such a case, what would be the best setup as per your judgement, especially on the data provisioning part ?

PS : There is no data footprint in data services currently. Consider a complete greenfield setup.

Regards,

Mihir

[former_member472435]

Hi Tammy,

Thanks for your reply. I went through your link, it is very much useful. What if my ECC is not s/4 HANA but on 6.0 on Oracle and I make my datasources ODP enabled by following SAP Note : 2232584, will they still become realtime enabled. If yes, how can I bring that realtime into Native HANA (non-BW) owing that fact I do not have RDA features in Native HANA. ABAP SDI adapters do not support realtime replication for BW extractors. Can SLT or dataservices enterprise edition solve the purpose ?

Regards,

Mihir

[Former Member]

Hi Mihir,

- BW extractors cannot be "source" for SLT, so if you want rely only on BW extractors, I guess SLT is not the solution for you.

- I am not sure of dataservices, but if it has feature of real time replication from ODP provider, that is one option.

- Second option is BW (process chains in streaming mode)

So, in a nutshell, if your requirement is to replicate from ECC into your datawarehouse in realtime, you need to invest in at least one of the following tools:

- BW

- SLT (will not replicate from BW extractors)

- Data services

If you can somehow manage without BW extractor, go for SLT.

If you need to rely on BW extractors, go for BW. The advantage with BW is that, it can go hand-in-hand with native HANA SQL data warehouse (there is complete integration of BW infoproviders with SQL and native DSOs). I guess, you can achieve without any need for data services.

Hope that helps.

Thanks,

Anup

[former_member472435]

HI Anup,

Thanks for your reply. Data services can have ODQ as source. BW extractors can populate the ODQ. Effectively dataservices can be used in conjunction with BW extractors. But this setup is not for real time extraction.

This ODQ which is populated by BW extractor can also be used by SDI abap adapter to provision data in native HANA, this too is not realtime.

So effectively you mean there is no means to leverage BW extractors which are semantically rich for real time data provisioning in native HANA.

Regards,

Mihir

[TammyPowlas]

I think it depends on the business case. I like BW as it has great BW content and I don't have to start from scratch and I have used BW with 3rd party data sources without any problem. I recommend you review the BW/4HANA askSAP call - see https://discuss.asug.com/docs/DOC-48555

[former_member472435]

Hi Tammy,

Thanks for your reply. I went through your link, it is very much useful. What if my ECC is not s/4 HANA but on 6.0 on Oracle and I make my datasources ODP enabled by following SAP Note : 2232584, will they still become realtime enabled. If yes, how can I bring that realtime into Native HANA (non-BW) owing that fact I do not have RDA features in Native HANA. ABAP SDI adapters do not support realtime replication for BW extractors. Can SLT or dataservices enterprise edition solve the purpose ?

Regards,

Mihir

[TammyPowlas]

Hi - your comment creates new questions that I don't have answers to, so I recommend creating a new question