SAP Netweaver Business Warehouse (SAP NetWeaver BW) is the name of the Business Intelligence, analytical, reporting and Data Warehousing solution produced by SAP AG. It was originally named SAP BIW (Business Information Warehouse), then abbreviated to SAP BW, but is now known as "SAP BI" at the end user level. In contrast, "BW" is still used to describe the underlying Data Warehouse Area and Accelerator components. It is often used by companies who run their business on SAP's operational systems.
BW is part of the SAP NetWeaver technology platform. Other components of SAP NetWeaver include SAP Enterprise Portal (EP, called SAP NetWeaver Portal as of Release 7.0), Web Application Server (WAS), SAP Process Integration (PI, or previously XI, i.e. eXchange Infrastructure) and Master Data Management (MDM). It also includes end-user reporting tools such as Report Designer, BEx Query Designer, BEx Web Application Designer and BEx Analyzer.
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It may be helpful to consider layers that make up the structure of SAP's BI solution:
SAP's BW solution has a pervasively employed data warehouse and contains a large number of pre-defined business content in the form of InfoCubes, Info Objects, authorization roles, and queries. This allows the ability to leverage SAP's experience and to reduce implementation cycles. The business content can be modified to meet an organization's specific requirements; however, this requires a longer process of customization of the pre-defined elements.
The following types of general user profiles exist:
However, roles and authorizations can be customized significantly.
The following are the most common forms of authentication:
The SAP NetWeaver Portal is the main entry point within SAP NetWeaver. In order to integrate SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence, the following two conditions must be satisfied: (note that SAP logon tickets are being used in this example) 1) BI trusts SAP logon tickets from EP because the public key of the EP certificate has been imported into BI. 2) EP trusts SAP logon tickets from BI because the public key of the BI certificate has been imported into EP.
Companies have to define who has access to which data. An authorization allows a user to perform a certain activity on a certain object in the BI system. There are two authorizations concepts to consider for BI: standard authorizations[1] and analysis authorizations.[2]
The communication channel used depends on different cases[3]
RFC communications is not encrypted. In order to encrypt RFC communications, the SAP environment must use Secure Network Communications (SNC) or the SAP Cryptographic Library.[4] SAP recommends the usage of x.509 certificates.[5]
Data can be protected from being accessed by an authorized end user by assigning analysis authorizations. Data is not protected under BI default settings.
Transactional Data is stored in a Datastore or an InfoCube. A Datastore serves as a storage location for transaction data at an atomic level. The data in a datastore is stored in transparent flat database tables.
An InfoCube is a set of relational tables arranged according to the star schema: A large fact table in the middle surrounded by several dimension tables.
The 7.0 version of BW was released in June 2006 as part of the SAP NetWeaver 7.0 (aka 2004s). This release includes many features, such as next-generation reporting and analytical features, major data warehousing enhancements, and a memory resident option for improving query performance called "BI Accelerator" (it has since been re-named BW Accelerator). The BW Accelerator comes as an external applicance, i.e. complete hardware with pre-installed software, and requires a separate licence fee. BW Accelerator is licenced per blade server and 16 GB increments of memory.
SAP acquired Business Objects, one of the premier business intelligence software providers, via tender offers executed December 2007-January 2008.[6] SAP has indicated that Business Objects will operate as an independent entity to preserve the principle of application agnosticism, but also promised a tighter integration between SAP BI and Business Objects. A new BI roadmap was recently released by the combined entity.[7]
According to SAP, more than 21,000 installations of SAP's BW solution exist.