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When will BIP will no longer support OLAP/BW Universes?

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As the product evolves, best practice and preferred connectivity methods have been via IDT, and BICS for OLAP functionality. BW universes of old on the BAPI layer are still supported and the old UDT is still delivered.

DeskI went through a similar evolution, where it was gone, then back because of a sudden shelving and too many stayed with DeskI vs converting to WebI. DeskI went away twice and came back twice, before it was finally gone, but not really. (the security and functions still remain in the platform)

Before that with Crystal Decisions - the Excel export .dll hack was provided to get it behave like Office 95, well into 2005 on BOE XI 12.1. Effectively dumbing the system down because clients were not adhering to the published best practices from CE9.0 that stated to design the report with fields snapped to each other, otherwise blank spaces lead to additional blank columns.

We have been on 4.x for some time now, published best practice, and preferred connectivity via IDT for universes, and BICS for BW or HANA (OLAP)

When is SAP going to publish a projected end of life date for UDT and BAPI universe support to gear customers up for converting their reports, before a release comes out that doesn't have it and catches them with their pants down and unable to update/upgrade/patch to the latest release??

Accepted Solutions (1)

Accepted Solutions (1)

denis_konovalov
Active Contributor

Deski saga is due to bad decision that "deski should become webi" -- deski was BO's version of crystal and it should have been pushed to convert to crystal, not webi.

In any case - I don't think anyone (specifically anyone here) knows "when" or most likely "if" UNV's will be phased out.
Current company line - nothing will be removed.
I hope product management has learned the lessons of deski saga and UNV's remain until the BI platform as we know it is dead.

Also, I'd be more worried about BAPI dying off, so maybe you should also ask in BW areas 😉

Denis, thanks for the response.

Not exactly the answer I was hoping for.

And I will see if I can tag this for BW also.

Without a definitive line in the sand, user communities will not convert.

Many, including the shops that I have worked at in the past, will still use the BEX/OLAP function through a BAPI Universe in lieu of converting to BICS. Though supported, it creates issues where Report consumers, get training on using WebI with UNV and because the system is fooled into using an OLAP source as a Relational source, they are allowed to do things in the WebI query layer that are not good practice for OLAP, if not completely restricted when using BICS (they are notorious for using things like "matches pattern" or "not in list" in the filters) Often we have found that the way the developer designed the BEX for universe consumption, doesn't always work the same in BICS and would potentially require a BEX re-write.

BICS at least helps prevent some of the bad user choices and data dumps, which users are also doing with WebI vs using Analysis for OLAP to get those type of data dumps, or requesting it from the BW team directly.

As you can see, the development costs of converting are weighed and if there isn't that date looming on the horizon, they will not plan nor expend resources to correct/migration from an old inadequate design.

Is there any other "Company Line"; such as, it is continued for support but not being enhanced or updated??

Calvin

denis_konovalov
Active Contributor

The official position is listed in the road map documents and is UDT is fully supported for the foreseeable future, new developments will be concentrated in IDT.

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