SAP BW/4HANA - launched in September 2016 - is SAP's next the Next-Generation of real-time data warehousing. It is designed to be a simplified, high-performance, open platform for historic and legacy enterprise data. It is a logical successor both for SAP BW customers, and for traditional EDW customers running Teradata, Netezza, Oracle and IBM DB2.
The design principles of SAP BW/4HANA are based on 4 pillars.
Simplification
SAP BW/4HANA removes a lot of functionalities which were only required to overcome the limitations of traditional RDBMS. This reduces the complexity for designing, implementing and modifying the data warehouse environment.
Object types have been reduced from 10 to 4:
- CompositeProvider to combine data from other InfoProviders (union/join)
- Open ODS View to support creation of BW data models for database tables for example
- Advanced DataStore Object to persistently store the data
- InfoObject to be used as key figures or characteristics
User Experience
BW4/HANA is delivered with a modern UI5 web-based interface for Business Users and Administrators. Eclipse/HANA Studio becomes the primary interface for most BW developments (e.g. creation of advanced Data Store Object). SAP GUI functionalities is gradually replaced by this new Modelling Tool and later on by a corresponding HANA Modelling Web-based interface.
Openness
BW/4HANA allows analysing data from multiple sources (e.g. Hadoop) and both structured and unstructured data (e.g. Social Medi). It is also open from an end-user perspective (models can be consumed from any major BI tool).
High Performance
SAP BW/4HANA is built on top of SAP HANA DB and leverage its ‘high-performance’ capabilities. This performance improvement is ensured by a push-down of complex BW operations and calculations to the HANA database (vs. the application layer). SAP BW/4HANA also offers a strong foundation for real-time analytics with specific libraries, like R-Script or custom HANA procedure to enhance the data with simulations, predictive analysis, etc.
element61 has extensive experience in the usage of SAP BW/4HANA and can therefore help you to support and maintain your existing environment or guide you through the migration process.