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DATA WAREHOUSE –
DATA FLOW IN SAP BW
Data Warehouse – Data Flow in SAP BW Guidance Consulting
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“1) Subject-oriented: Meaning that the data in the database is organized so that all the data elements relating to
the same real-world event or object are linked together.
2) Time-variant: Meaning that the changes to the data in the database are tracked and recorded so that reports
can be produced showing changes over time.
3) Non-volatile: Meaning that data in the database is never over-written or deleted, but retained for future
reporting.
4) Integrated: Meaning that the database contains data from most or all of an organization's operational
applications, and that this data is made consistent.”
Simply put together, information/data in the most important and valuable asset a company has and how they can
utilize this data, forms the basis of a successful company. For example, an organization would use the
information that's stored in its data warehouse to find out what day of the 1st week they sold the most cell
phones of a particular model in February 2007, or how employee sick leave the week before holiday season in
December differed between Houston and Chicago from 2005-2007.
OLTP systems can perform reporting tasks but has its limitation. As we discussed earlier, OLAP Systems has
been adopted by many organization to oversee the complications and overcome the limitations produced by
OLTP systems.
For data from any source (SAP or non-SAP sources) and of any age (historic or current), Data warehousing in
Business Intelligence (BI) allows:
1) Integration (data acquisition from source systems)
2) Transformations
3) Consolidation
4) Clean up
5) Storage
6) Retrieval for analysis and interpretation
Data warehousing in BI allows you to directly access source data as well as physically storing data in BI. In the
foregoing pages, we will discuss the process of dataflow in the SAP BW environment.
Dataflow in BW
Definition
It shows the flow of data from the source system to the InfoProvider where it gets readied for use in the reports.
Simply put together “the data flow is the path that data have to follow (among several stages and provider) in
order to have all the info available for final reporting purpose”.
from RSA1 (Administrator Workbench: Modeling) Æ Click on InfoProvider on the left panel Æ Then look for
the particular cube you want to see the dataflow for Æ Right click on it and choose “Show Data Flow”, you will
get to this screen FIG 01.
Dataflow in Detail
We will go in details in each of these objects starting from the bottom.
Source Systems
Systems that provide BI with data are described as source systems FIG 02.
4) This information should be provided to you by basis team, team lead and/or project manager.
c) The ALE settings, which are needed for the communication between a BI System and an SAP System,
are created in the background with the use of the created destinations. These settings are made in BI as
well as in the source system. The BI settings for the new connection are created in BI.
* ALE stands for Application Link Enabling is the proprietary SAP technology for communication between Source System
and BI Systems.
d) If the new SAP source system has been created, metadata is requested automatically from the source
system. The metadata for DataSources is also replicated to BI in the D version.
Datasource
SAP describes Datasource as “Data that logically belongs together is stored in the source system in the form of
DataSources”. So to say that DataSources are used for extracting data from a source system and for transferring
data into BI.
1) DataSources are used to extract and stage data from source systems. The DataSource can be used for all
objects that contain data i.e. Master data (Attribute, Text, and Hierarchy) and Transactional data.
2) Or for that matter the data is loaded into BI from any source in the DataSource structure.
3) The structure for transferring data from a DataSource to SAP BW is called transfer structure (we will
discuss this later in the class under the same topic)
4) The DataSources subdivide the data that is provided by a source system into self-contained business areas.
5) An InfoPackage is used for this purpose. You determine the target into which data from the DataSource is to
be updated during the transformation. You also assign DataSource fields to target object InfoObjects in BI.
6) SAP R/3 systems provides a number of SAP Business Content DataSources that can be used immediately.
We will discuss DataSources in detail in the following classes when we actually create a DataSource for the
purpose of this class.
There will be situations when you will have to delete data in the PSA. One possible reason could be that it has
outgrown its size. Follow these simple steps to do so:
1) From RSA1 (Administrative Workbench - Modeling, click on
2) Right mouse click on this PSA node on this screen and choose from the menu. You can
do this from individual nodes from where you want to delete PSA data as well.
a) From this screen, you can select no. of days the data older that needs to be deleted.
b) Here you can select the date you want the data to be deleted before certain date (mm/dd/yyyy).
c) Click on to get to this screen
d) You can start the deletion , schedule , after completion of a certain job
, after an event is triggered , and at and also we make it as a
by checking this box.
e) Click to come back to “Delete PSA” window and then click start the deletion.
You can achieve this by Process Chain using the Process type “Deletion of requests
from PSA". Process chains are available from BW 3.0, which we will discuss later in
the class under the same topic.
Transfer Rules
• When an InfoPackage is created, a source system, a DataSource and an InfoSource are needed to
be selected. So, essentially, we are creating transfer rules between the DataSource and the
communication structure of the InfoSource.
InfoPackage’s are meant for scheduling the load and they send a request Idoc to the
source system to fetch the data. You would create InfoPackage’s for each of the source
system which is based on transfer rules.
We have already created DataSource in the earlier scenario, now in order to create transfer rules, we will
need to have an InfoSource created (it will be explained in the next section). So from the AWB (RSA1),
we click on under modeling. Then on the right hand side we double click on any
InfoSource (e.g. ZFISL related) or right mouse click on the InfoSource and choose . It is
possible you will get this screen,
Keep hitting , and it will take you to this screen as given in FIG 09,
system , if it is different.
3) Transfer method shows once the DataSource was replicated, the data was
transferred to PSA.
4) Circle 4 is where you will click and put your cursor (e.g. ) there in the “Assign InfoObject
Field” and then you click on circle 5 (e.g. ) and then circle 6 (in normal scenario, this
icon will be enabled and not disabled as I am showing in this example). Now they will be connected
and then click on circle 7 .
5) You can click on circle 8 to specify “Transfer Rules”. You will come to this screen “Edit
Transfer Rules”. See FIG 11.
6) Here you can specify whether this is a “InfoObject” or “Constant”. You can also write a ABAB
routine and customize it, for e.g. changing the currency type. You can also specify a Formula here
and do some calculations.
7) If you click on circle 9, this will allow you to search for specific objects in the list.
Updates Rules
3) Right mouse click on the InfoProvider (here it is InfoCube FIAR: Line Items with tech name:
ZFIAR_C03) and choose .
4) You will come to this screen, click on to choose the InfoSource.
a) This is the InfoSource selection screen, it will also show how many entries it has.
Even the ones we install from Business Content will be seen here.
b) Scroll down to look for the one you are looking for. You can also and then type
in the name of the InfoSource (full or in part) and search for it.
c) Highlight the one you want to select and
d) Click to come back to the Update Rules screen.
InfoSource
- An InfoSource is a set of all logically associated information.
- InfoSource can contain Transaction Data (which is stored in InfoCube) and Master Data (which has
Attributes, Texts and Hierarchies and these data is stored in different tables)
- InfoSource describes all the transaction available for a business transaction or a type of business
transaction.
- As discussed before here, Transfer structures support the transfer of data in a DataSource between a
Source System and the associated SAP BW System. The transfer structure transports the DataSource
data from a Source System to an SAP BW System and passes it on to the InfoSource using transfer
rules.
- The Communication structure is generated from InfoSource and is independent of Source System. It
is filled from the transfer structure in accordance with the transfer rules.
- The Communication structure contains all the fields in an InfoSource.
- Each InfoCube can have one set of Update Rules that determines how the data in the InfoSource is
stored in the InfoCube
InfoPackage
Info-packages trigger the data load into BW system from the source system. An info-package is created
for a specific data source and info source combination.
1) When you trigger the info-package it sends a request to the source system to start the extraction
process and this corresponds to the step "Data Request Received" in monitor under details tab. It is the
first step.
2) Then the selections specified in the info-package are transferred to the source system to select the
requested data from BW system. Then it is sent back to BW system.
3) Once it reach BW, it gets into the PSA and then it gets updated into the data target (depends on what
settings are made in IP). No rule (Transfer rules / update rules) comes into picture when data is stored in
PSA. Only the transfer structure is used to map the BW info-objects with the source system fields.
4) After data is stored into PSA, the update into the data targets begins. First the transfer rules are
applied -> data then flows through the communication structure -> update rules are applied and finally
the records gets updated into the data target.
References
1) William H. Inmon, Richard D. Hackathorn: Using the Data Warehouse, John Wiley & Son's
2) Few extracts taken from wikipedia.com and the site URL is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_warehouse
3) Data modeling book referred, by SAP Press.
4) Class notes referred from Vinay Karna of RD Data Solutions.
5) Several SDN and help.sap.com links that helped me create this document.
6) http://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw04/helpdata/en/e3/e60138fede083de10000009b38f8cf/frameset.htm
7) http://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw04s/helpdata/en/fc/1251421705be30e10000000a155106/frameset.htm
8) http://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw2004s/helpdata/en/a8/6b023b6069d22ee10000000a11402f/frameset.htm
9) http://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw2004s/helpdata/en/e9/6bf2d90e533f409ee56d3f586c325a/frameset.htm
10) https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/thread?forumID=131&threadID=206135&messageID=2286851#2286851
11) https://forums.sdn.sap.com/thread.jspa?forumID=131&threadID=206135&messageID=2286851#2286851
12) https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/thread?forumID=131&threadID=174856&messageID=1959651
13) Extensively referred to Vinay Karna’s notes.