Persistent Staging Area

Purpose
The Persistent Staging Area (PSA) is the inbound storage area for data from the source systems in the SAP Business Information Warehouse. The requested data is saved, unchanged from the source system.

Request data is stored in the transfer structure format in transparent, relational database tables in the Business Information Warehouse. The data format remains unchanged, meaning that no summarization or transformations take place, as is the case with InfoCubes.

When loading flat files, the data does not remain completely unchanged, since it is adjusted by conversion routines if necessary (for example, the date format 31.21.1999 is converted to 19991231 in order to ensure uniformity of data). You determine the transfer method PSA in the Transfer rules maintenance. If you set the PSA when you are extracting data, you get improved performance if you use TRFCs for loading the data. The temporary storage facility in the PSA also allows you to check and change the data before the update into data targets. In contrast to a data request with IDocs, a data request in the PSA also gives you various options for a further update of the data in the data targets. The possible coupling of the loading process from the further processing in BW likewise contributes to an improved loading performance. The operative system is not debited if data errors first appear with further processing.

The PSA delivers the backup status for the ODS (until the total staging process is confirmed). The duration of the data storage in the PSA is medium-term, since the data can still be used for reorganization. However data storage when updating ODS objects is short-term. A PSA is displayed for every InfoSource in the PSA tree of the Administrator Workbench. You get to the PSA tree in the Administrator Workbench using either Modeling or Monitoring. The requested data records appear, divided according to request, under the source system they belong to for an InfoSource in the PSA tree.

Functions
The data records in BW are transferred to the transfer structure when you load data with the transfer method PSA. One TRFC is carried out per data package. Data is written to the PSA table from the transfer structure, and stored there. A transparent PSA table is created for every transfer structure that is activated. The PSA tables each have the same structure as their respective transfer structures. They are also flagged with key fields for the request ID, the data package number, and the data record number. Since the requested data is stored unchanged in the PSA, it can have errors if it already had errors in the source system. If the requested data records have been written into the PSA table, you can check the data for the request and change incorrect data records. Depending on the type of update, data is transferred from the PSA table into the communication structure using the transfer rules. From the communication structure, the data is finally updated into the corresponding data target. Using partitioning, you can separate the dataset of a PSA table into several smaller, physically independent, and redundancy-free units. This separation can mean improved performance when you update data from the PSA. In the BW Customizing Implementation Guide, you determine from which number of data records a partition is created, under Business Information Warehouse Connections to Other Systems Maintain Control Parameters for Data Transfer. Only data records from a complete request are stored in a partition. The specified value is a threshold value.

As of BW 3.0, it is possible to load hierarchies using the PSA from OLTP DataSources released for this. The respective DataSources will be delivered with PlugIn (-A) 2001.2 at the earliest. You can also use a PSA to load hierarchies from files.

Restrictions
The number of fields is limited to a maximum of 255 when using TRFCs to transfer data. The length of the data record is limited to 1962 bytes when you use TRFCs. Data transfer with IDocs cannot be used in connection with the PSA.