SAP BW Architecture – Overview
SAP BW Architecture : The graphic shows a physical and logical division between data staging in the source systems, data storage and management, and analysis. A source system is a system that provides the SAP BW Architecture system with data. SAP BW distinguishes between four kinds of source systems:
Databases: SAP BW allows data to be loaded from external relational database systems. A DataSource is generated based on the external table structure, enabling table content to be loaded quickly and consistently into SAP BW.
SAP BW Architecture
Non-SAP systems: A big advantage of SAP BW lies in the fact that is has an open architecture vis-a-vis external OLTP providers and other legacy systems. Particularly in a heterogenous system landscape, it is thus possible to use SAP BW as a consolidated data basis for reporting that covers the entire organization. SAP delivers various tools which allow these interfaces to be implemented quickly and efficiently. These are looked at next.
Data providers: As well being able to obtain data from a variety of available systems, SAP BW can also be supplied with target-orientated data from providers. For example, the organizations AC Nielsen US or Dun & Bradstreet provide market research data, which can be loaded into SAP BW for benchmarking and then measured against your own operative data. The interface for the transfer of data supplied by the data providers is already available in SAP BW. This means the data import can run smoothly.
You can send data from SAP and non-SAP sources to SAP BW using SAP Exchange Infrastructure (SAP XI). In SAP BW the data is placed in the delta queue and is available there for further integration and consolidation.Data transfer using SAP XI is SOAP-based.
SAP XI is based on general standards so as to enable external systems to be integrated. At the center of the infrastructure is an XML-based communication that uses HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol). The application-specific contents are transferred in messages in user-defined XML (eXtensible Markup Language) schema from the sender to the receiver using the Integration Server.
mySAP Business Suite components: SAP BW is fully integrated into the mySAP Business Suite . It functions as a central data warehousing tool. Predefined extraction structures and programs are delivered by SAP. These allow source data from mySAP Business Suite components to be loaded directly into the SAP BW system. Complex organizational structures in which data from individual systems is collected, create a need for a system architecture consisting of several BW systems.
These temporarily store data in the detailed form of an organizational unit, before they can then be transferred to a central SAP BW for carrying out comprehensive reporting.