Overview of my SDN Blogs 2008/2009

The complete list can be found here. These are the ones from 2008-2009:

Performance Study: Web Intelligence on top of SAP BW
(11 November 2009)

This is a kind of sequel to the blogs I've posted earlier this year. A long-term SAP customer provided real-world example that shows the performance improvements that have been achieved through the joint efforts of the WebI, ODA and BW development teams.

Comparing SAP BW and an Oracle DW
(14 April 2009)

This blog looks at the situation of a customer who migrated his hand-crafted Oracle data warehouse to SAP BW. It is a tangible, real-world case that contradicts many of the alleged pros and cons of the differing approaches to data warehousing. Beside TCO, the new SQL interface on SAP BW allows even for a surprising 1:1 comparison regarding query performance.

Faster Universe-Based Access To BW via MDX
(16 March 2009)

Business Objects's semantic layer can expose cubes as OLAP universes to client tools like WebIntelligence (or WebI for short). This applies to OLAP servers like Microsoft's Analysis Services or Hyperion's Essbase but also to SAP BW. There is a component called OLAP Data Access (ODA) that retrieves data via MDX - a query language for multi-dimensional data sources. In the case of BW, the ODA component connects to BW's OLAP BAPI. This connection has now been optimized and streamlined in order to improve the interoperability. This blog gives some insight in what has been done and what the effects are. It complements the blog on the two options to access BW data via universes.

SQL Access to BW via Data Federator
(6 March 2009)

In another blog, a number of improvements have been discussed regarding universe-based access to BW infoproviders. One major new option is that it is now possible to access BW infoproviders via SQL. Technically, this has been achieved via Business Objects's Data Federator (DF) that includes SQL engine running on top of federated data sources - one of those can be a BW 7.01 system. This blog provides some more insights into that approach.

Better Performance For Universe-Based Access To BW
(6 Mar 2009)

This blog introduces two new pieces of development shipping with BW 7.01 SPS3 that significantly improve the performance when using Business Objects WebIntelligence on top of NW BW.

Native Excel 2007 On Top Of Netweaver BI 7.0
(29 January 2008)

Using Excel in the context of BW is nothing new: (1) there is BEx Analyzer and (2) there is the native pivot tables inside Excel that connect via OLE DB for OLAP (ODBO) to BW. While (1) has mostly been the option of choice, option (2) has tended to be sidelined. The latter is significantly changed with Excel 2007 and NW BI 7.0.