Enable Real time reporting - Using SAP BW, Business Objects, HANA, and BODS

While SAP ECC has been the largest enterprise software used for business processing across the world. The huge data accumulated as a result of daily transactions across business functions like Finance and Accounting, Controlling, logistics is moved from ECC to SAP BW for analysis and data mining purpose. The data is moved post business hours to SAP BW and T-1 reporting is made possible.  However, there are various ways and means through which real-time reporting is possible which is cumbersome and add work load to both ECC and BW system.

SAP Business objects suite of products, the enhanced user experience is achieved. Highly formatted complex reports, dashboards, and scorecards leveraging the SAP security model on an web-based portal is enabled.

With the change in business, the C-suite has started looking for real-time data. Instead of waiting for 24 hours to know what has happened yesterday, real-time information allows them to take more proactive decisions. With this in mind, SAP HANA has been introduced which stands for High Analytics Appliance. An appliance is combination of high configuration hardware and software.

SAP HANA is faster:

In-memory computing:

 It works in-memory, that is the data is stored in volatile memory RAM and not in hard disk which is conventional way.  The administration of HANA deals with the backup strategies of RAM data.

Multi-core architecture:

Let us look into hardware part, which uses multi core architecture for speed processing. Core is an integral part of CPU which does parallel processing of the read, write actions being performed. The blade server which is used by SAP HANA supplied by its partners which includes CISCO, HP, IBM and Fujitsu uses many boards which is nothing but multiple cores. This drastically reduces the write, read time we perform for reporting.

Column Store:

If you see a typical database, the records are stored in rows. When you perform a search operation, it reads one by one line and picks the relevant record.

Let us see the below example

Customer Material Quantity
C001    M001    100
C002    M002     200
C002    M003     40


The data in HANA DB is stored as below


Customer   Material    Quantity

C001   M001    100
C002   M002    200
            M003    40

It stored the unique values pertaining to the dimension. The read is performed using the indexes between dimensions. More details in below link.

https://blogs.saphana.com/2013/08/21/hana-columns-and-oltp/


SAP BW on HANA

The underlying database for SAP BW typically been used is Oracle, SQL Server, and IBM DB2. SAP BW on HANA offers great features and tools to leverage the power of HANA and BW. The Open DS view, composite provider allows seamless integration of HANA analytic views (in replication  SAP tables). There are lot of advantages of using SAP BW on HANA in comparison to directly using SAP HANA with BO for customers who already have SAP BW.

The role of SAP BODS

With SAP BW 7.4, SAP BODS can be used as a datasource, just like DBCONNECT, UDCONNECT.
The data from SAP ECC is moved instantly to SAP HANA using BODS and SLT tools.


SAP HANA with BO

when the SAP tables are replicated into HANA. Attribute views, analytic views are created in HANA and this can be exported to BO reporting. All BO suite of products can be used for real-time reporting.