SAP Business Information Warehouse

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SAP Business Information Warehouse (SAP BW) is the name of the Business Intelligence, analytical, reporting and Data Warehousing (DWH) solution which is one of the major enterprise software applications produced by SAP AG.

BW consists among other things of components for data management (Data Warehousing Workbench), extensive data modeling capabilities, an embedded analytical engine, a suite of rich front-end analytical tools refererred to as Business Explorer (BEx), and operational tools used for importing the most current transactional data into the system. It may be helpful to consider three layers that make up the structure of SAP's BI solution

Extraction, Transformation and Load (ETL) layer - responsible for extracting data from a specific source, applying transformation rules, and loading it into SAP BW system.
Data warehouse area - responsible for storing the information in a various types of structures, including multidimensional structures called InfoCubes.
Reporting - responsible for accessing the information in data warehouse area and presenting it in a user-friendly manner to the analyst or business user.

SAP's BI is a very pervasively employed data warehouse / analytical enterprise software solution, often utilized heavily by companies that essentially run their business on SAP operational systems such as SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (SAP ERP, traditionally known as SAP R/3). SAP's BI solution contains a large number of predefined extractors, a very significant amount of pre-defined business content in the form of InfoCubes, master data (i.e. objects representing the entity for "Customer", or "Material"), authorization roles, query views and reports all delivered in the software by SAP. Some of the significant benefits of this approach include the ability to leverage SAP's substantial business knowledge from many years of developing extremely sophisticated software systems for the world's largest companies, typically shortening project development cycles in the process. The pre-defined business content can be modified to meet an organization's specific requirements, while at the same time taking advantage of general aspects of these delivered data models and reports that are somewhat foundational and have broad application in business, government, and education.

SAP BW is now part of a suite of SAP applications called SAP NetWeaver. Other components of SAP NetWeaver include SAP Enterprise Portal (EP), Web Application Server (WAS), SAP Process Integration (XI, or eXchange Infrastructure) and Master Data Management (MDM).

SAP BW, originally named SAP BIW (Business Information Warehouse), was released in June 2006 as part of the SAP NetWeaver 2004s new version, aka BI in SAP NetWeaver 2004s. This new release includes several new features, such as next-generation reporting and analytical features, major data warehousing enhancements, and innovative techology for query performance optimization called "BI accelerator". From SAP NetWeaver 2004s on the term SAP BW is obsolete, and instead it is referred simply as "SAP NetWeaver BI" or more accurately, "BI in SAP NetWeaver"

[edit] Further reading

McDonald; Wilmsmeier, Dixon, Inmon (2006). Mastering the SAP Business Information Warehouse, Second Edition. Wiley. ISBN 0471219711.
Mehrwald, Christian (2003). SAP Business Information Warehouse 3. Heidelberg: dpunkt-Verlag. ISBN 3-89864-179-1.
Scott, Peter (2006). SAP Business Explorer (BEx) Tools. SAP Press. ISBN 1-59229-086-8.
Scott, Peter (2004). Mastering BW Reporting. www.researchsummary.ca/bw.