The SAP Business Warehouse (BW) is a system that uses a separate database to stage information from various data sources such as databases, online services, and the internet for the purpose of data reporting and analysis.
Data is staged in various forms, including personalized reports, freely definable queries, and predefined reports. Users can analyze data for key facts.
For example, a data warehouse in the retail sector can be used to do the following:
- Identify slow moving goods and big sellers.
- Investigate the profitability of branches in different locations.
- Investigate the effectiveness of market analysis.
- Evaluate customer surveys and complaints.
- Analyze warehouse stock levels.
- Analyze shopping carts, using cash register receipts.
SAP HANA combines database, data processing, and application platform capabilities in memory. The platform provides libraries for predictive, planning, text processing, spatial, and business analytics. This architecture enables converged Online Transactional Processing (OLTP) and Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) data processing within a single in-memory, column-based data store with ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability) compliance, while eliminating data redundancy and latency.
By providing advanced capabilities, such as predictive text analytics, spatial processing, and data virtualization, on the same architecture, it further simplifies application development and processing across big data sources and structures.
Some unique features of SAP HANA’s in-memory technology are to store massive amounts of information compressed in main memory, utilize parallel processing on multiple cores, and move data intensive calculations from the application layer into the database layer for even faster processing. Since all the detailed data is available in main memory and processed on the fly, there is no need for aggregated information and materialized views, fundamentally simplifying the architecture and hence reducing latency, complexity, and cost.
SAP BUSINESSOBJECTS UNIVERSE provides open and agnostic access to all corporate databases, data warehouses (including SAP BW), and applications. It also enables a consistent business user experience. A universe creates the code that accesses the data for the reporting tools.
A universe contains no data but rather points to a data source, such as a database, data warehouse, OLAP cube, and other sources. It is typically comprised of three components:
- Connection - Identifies what data source the universe points to and contains all the information for accessing that data source.
- Data Foundation - When the universe points to a relational data source, the Data Foundation identifies what tables contain the data required for business users' reports and analyses.
- Business Layer - Identifies the specific columns within the tables that are needed for business users' reports and analyses. The Business Layer is the only component of the universe exposed to business users and provides a user-friendly, logical organization of the data they need for their reports and analyses.
Note
Although most analytic tools can utilize universes for accessing data, SAP Analysis for Microsoft Office can only access SAP HANA or SAP BW directly and does not utilize the universe as a source.
