how sap netweaver bw running on hana

8/2/2019 How SAP NetWeaver BW Running on HANA

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2012 BI Expert Reprinted with permission from BI Expert Reproduction or distribution in any form is strictly prohibited without the permission of the publisher, Wellesley Information Services.

NetWeaver BW, there are changes to the

IT landscape to consider, as well as a needto understand how these IT changes lead

to specific business benefits. For the busi-

ness, the key changes are improved

reporting performance, real-time data

access, and the ability to simulate and

plan faster. For IT, there is cost savings

through improved loading performance,

simplified maintenance, and greater mod-

eling flexibility. Within this article, I focus

on the key business benefits. In a follow-

up article, "3 Time-Saving Results of

Using SAP HANA with SAP NetWeaver

BW," I outline the key IT benefits.

Improved Reporting

Performance

First and foremost, lets get the red herring

out of the way. Everyone always asks, Is

SAP HANA just about performance? Is it

How SAP NetWeaver BW Running on HANAChanges Business Processes

by Prakash Darji, Vice President & General Manger, Data Warehousing Solutions & SAP HANA Platform, SAP

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Historically, SAP customers who were

looking to manage large volumes of datahave deployed SAP NetWeaver BW. Gen-

erally, SAP NetWeaver BW requires

traditional relational database management

systems such as Oracle DB, Microsoft

SQL Server, or IBM DB2. In these envi-

ronments, SAP NetWeaver BW provides a

foundation for enterprise data warehous-

ing, supporting data from SAP and

third-party source systems. However, now

SAP offers a new data warehouse product:

SAP NetWeaver BW powered by SAPHANA.

What follows is an overview of how SAP

NetWeaver BW has changed with the

introduction of SAP HANA as a database

option. I assume the reader already has

SAP NetWeaver BW knowledge.

With HANA running on top of SAP

Gain an understanding of how SAP HANA works with SAP NetWeaver BW, and examine the busi -

ness process changes that come from the release. Learn about how SAP NetWeaver BW

powered by SAP HANA differs from SAP NetWeaver BW on a traditional relational database man-

agement system, and the new capabilities that are available within the release. In addition, find

how this offering provides a simpler environment to manage when compared to traditional rela -

tion database management systems.

SAP HANA is a multipurpose, data-

source-agonistic, in-memory

appliance that combines SAP soft-

ware components optimized on

hardware provided by SAP partners.

SAP HANA provides capabilities for

real-time operational analytics and

use as an Agile data mart. It is alsoavailable to be deployed as a data-

base for SAP NetWeaver BW.

Key Concept>>

just a speeds-and-feeds world?

Although SAP HANA is not just about

performance, as I discuss later, the report-

ing performance is a key capability that is

enhanced by the in-memory appliance.

Companies running SAP NetWeaver BW

on a relational database management

system (RDBMS) can see dramatically

improved performance by moving to the

SAP HANA appliance. Beyond perfor-

mance improvement, you also achieve

performance consistency. You may ask

Why is consistent performance

important?

SAP first introduced in-memory accelera-

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tion for reporting with SAP Business

Warehouse Accelerator (BWA). While

SAP BWA allowed users initially to

accelerate InfoCubes, and then DataS-

tore Objects (DSO), this led to end users

getting drastically different experiences

when working with the SAP NetWeaverBW environment.

If a dataset used for reporting happened

to be in BWA, users got fast response

times on the full granular dataset,

regardless of what dimension they

drilled down on. However, if a user

were reporting on a dataset not indexed

into BWA, the user experienced subopti-

mal performance compared to BWA.

This discrepancy, while understood well

by IT, didnt make much sense for busi-ness users. Business users instead expect

consistent performance regardless of the

dataset they report on or the granularity

of drill-down they use.

SAP has addressed this discrepancy by

putting the SAP NetWeaver BW

instance on SAP HANA. In this case, all

InfoCubes and DSOs store their datasets

directly in memory (Figure 1).

However, it is not just the memory that

improves performance. The massively

parallel processing (MPP) architecture

of SAP HANA allows you to use paral-

lel processing across nodes, datasets,

and even CPU cores within SAP HANA.

MPP refers to the ability to parallelize

queries and computation to take advan-

tage of discrete memory and CPU

compute power.

MPP, coupled with the dataset being

stored in a columnar format, helps

reduce the I/O for analytical queries.

The combination of MPP, in-memory,

and columnar storage are the three key

technologies that provide consistently

improved performance.

However, if you put a faster database

under SAP NetWeaver BW, wouldnt

you just get faster database read times?

A lot of query response times are specifi-

cally dedicated to OLAP processing in the

ABAP tier. One of the key ideas to note is

that with SAP NetWeaver BW on SAP

HANA, SAP did more than just certify

SAP HANA as a database. SAP has

rewritten the SAP NetWeaver BW stack to

take advantage of SAP HANA.

Whenever possible, OLAP operations and

aggregation operations that were previ-

ously implemented in ABAP have been

pushed into the SAP HANA database. In

this way, SAP HANA performs the bulk

of the processing and execution of queries,

and the ABAP tier carries significantly

less workload for queries. The key

premise is that data-intensive operations

occur close to where the data is stored and

the core MPP, in-memory, and columnar

constructs are used for both data persis-

tency as well as query processing. This is

outlined in Figure 2.

The net result is users get consistently

improved performance on all of their SAP

NetWeaver BW data, not just some of it.

The query response times are similar to

that of SAP BWA.

However, one point to note is the genera-

tion of hardware for SAP HANA, which

has progressed since the SAP BWA days.

All queries on DSOs and InfoCubes operate in-memoryFigure 1

Movement of calculations to the in-memory database layerFigure 2


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While BWA certified Intel Nehalem (8

core) processors, SAPs current generation

of hardware for SAP HANA uses Intel

Westmere (10 core) processors, and will

likely use 12-core processors in the near

future. Additionally, the smallest certified

configuration of memory for SAP HANAis a 128 GB server with scale-up configu-

rations up to 1 TB of memory. Further, as

of this writing, vendors already have certi-

fied configurations for scale-out up to 8

TB of memory. These newer systems are

significantly larger than SAP BWA envi-

ronments today. See the sidebar,

"Scale-Up and Scale-Out," for more

details.

Real-Time Data Access

Beyond improved reporting performance,

businesses also want more timely data.

Today, with SAP NetWeaver BW on a tra-

ditional RDBMS, the process to get data

into the environment is typically a nightly

batch job of running extraction from the

SAP Business Suite or other, third-party

sources into SAP NetWeaver BW.

However, SAP HANA provides the

capability to consume data in real time

by replicating the transactions as they

happen from the SAP or third-party

transactional source system (Figure 3).

The major benefit from real-time report-

ing comes from understanding that

real-time data helps augment existing

SAP NetWeaver BW environments. For

example, companies typically have sales

order data in SAP NetWeaver BW that

includes sales order header and sales

order line item details, which are com-

bined in a MultiProvider in SAP

NetWeaver BW. However, if youre

interested in open order reporting, you

cannot get this from SAP NetWeaver

BW on a traditional RDBMS today, as

SAP NetWeaver BW has nightly batch

windows for loading, and by those

times, an order status could have

changed.

Prior to SAP HANA, the only way to

get open orders reporting was to conduct

this reporting in SAP ERP Central Com-

ponent (SAP ECC). However, with SAPHANA, the open orders data is logically

made available in the SAP NetWeaver

BW environment by using transient pro-

viders. This data can be merged with

sales order data in SAP NetWeaver BW

through a MultiProvider or composite

provider. This provides a full end-to-end

view of sales order data, whether it be a

historical year-over-year view for 10

years or an up-to-the-second status on

any given order.

While SAP NetWeaver BW previously

has provided real-time extraction,

usually this information was extracted

into the inbound layer (e.g., DSOs). The

data was not made available immedi-

ately for reporting due to requiring

activation of the data, then the data

being pre-aggregated into InfoCubes orUsing real-time data within SAP NetWeaver BWFigure 3

Reporting and analytics tools

SAP NetWeaver BW

SAP NetWeaver

BW schema

Non-SAP NetWeaver

BW schema

Composite provider

InfoCube

SAP HANA SAP HANA

Transient

InfoProvider

QueryQuery

Below are brief details about scale-up and scale-out for SAP HANA:

Scale-up: Today, rack servers can easily support up to 64 cores and 2 TB of mem-

ory per server. Companies can scale up their racks to the maximum configurationcertified on a rack server. See the list of certified hardware at services.sap.com/

pam > SAP HANA for more details. As the hardware technology improves, ven-

dors will likely provide configurations with larger numbers of cores, CPUs, and

memory per server.

Scale-out: SAP can have the SAP HANA software support scaling through distri-

bution across multiple instances. This is either rack or blade, and SAP works with

hardware partners to certify the optimal configurations for customer environments.

Distribution of workloads basically works on the concept of having a single mas-

ter instance and having many other slave instances to share the workload (simi-

lar to BWA today).

Scale-Up and Scale-Out


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under SAP NetWeaver BW is the ability

to achieve better budgets and forecasts

through faster planning and simulation.

Traditionally, SAP NetWeaver BW pro-

vided the capabilities of SAP BW

Integrated Planning (BW-IP) as a toolset

for building planning applications. [Just to

double-check, I cant find any official

SAP reference to BW-IP. I see a lot about

SAP BI Integrated Planning is that the

same thing?] In this toolset, data is read

from the underlying RDMBS for SAP

NetWeaver BW and is moved into the

SAP ABAP application tier. Within ABAP,

deltas are calculated, planning logic is

executed, and the data is written to the

database. However, when SAP NetWeaver

BW uses SAP HANA as an underlyingdatabase, there is an additional component

available called the Planning Application

Kit, which moves the planning logic into

SAP HANA (Figure 4).

The result of executing planning opera-

tions close to where the data resides is that

the system does not spend time transport-

ing large datasets back and forth from the

database to the application tier. The

system also uses the multi-core, in-mem-

ory-based engine to execute the planninglogic, which is compute intensive.

For example, in Figure 5, assume that a

business planner wants to change the FY

2011 plan for Germany from 250 Euros to

300 Euros.

Key assumptions of the data model

include:

52 weeks per year

500 branches for which you need to

plan

Assume you want to execute this plan

based on the Scenario A architecture in

Figure 4. Within BW-IP, the operations

occur as follows:

1. Determine the delta > +50

2. Disaggregate (in the application server):

Again, what makes all of this possible is

the real-time replication capabilities of

data brought into SAP HANA and the

ability of in-memory, MPP, and columnar

database technology that allows reporting

on the transactional data as it happens,

without pre-aggregation ormaterialization.

Additionally, companies can use SAP

NetWeaver BW as a unified reporting

access layer for any type of reporting,

whether it is analysis, exploration, or

dashboards. This becomes important as

they plan their data authorization strategy;

SAP NetWeaver BW analysis authoriza-

tions can help secure all of their data,

including the real-time data.

Simulate and Plan Faster

Another result of running SAP HANA

aggregates (for reporting performance

reasons). Fundamentally, the data coming

from SAP ECC was also never really real

time, but more near real time because

there was usually a five-minute polling

interval for the real-time extractors. Addi-

tionally, the real-time extractor approach

also had the disadvantage of putting extra

strain on the network, both SAP

NetWeaver BW and SAP ECC, due to the

continuous polling mechanisms.

SAP HANAs real-time reporting provides

the benefit of having a full, up-to-the-min-

ute view of data along with the full

transactional history in SAP NetWeaver

BW. This also means that your consoli-

dated master data in SAP NetWeaver BW

(e.g., customer hierarchies, product hierar-

chies) can be used when reporting on this

real-time data.

Sample planning datasetFigure 5

The Planning Application Kit provides planning logic implementation in SAP HANAFigure 4

Planning interface and user

SAP NetWeaver BW

Scenario A: BW-IP

Save data

Database

Planning interface and user

Scenario B: Planning Application Kit

Disaggregate using

in-memory and MPP based

on calculation engine

SAP HANA

Calculate delta using

SAP NetWeaver BW OLAP engine

Orchestration

Disaggregate usingSAP NetWeaver BW OLAP engine

Generate database update

statements

SAP NetWeaver BW

Identify changed values

Orchestration

Generate a single instruction onhow to disaggregate

Create and save data


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Per week (52)

Per branch (500)

26,000 combinations and values

3. Send 26,000 values to the database to

save

When testing this scenario in the lab, it

took about three minutes to complete all

the logic as stated above.

Now lets look at the same planning cycle

based on Scenario B in Figure 4, for

which the Planning Application Kit is

enabled. The operations occur as follows:

1. Determine the delta > +50

2. Send one value to the database with

instruction to disaggregate

3. Disaggregate (in the database engine):

Per week (52)

Per branch (500)

Create + save 26,000 values

In the lab, this scenario with the Planning

Application Kit enabled only took 22seconds.

Largely, what this means is that you can

iterate on your forecasts and budgets more

quickly, and run more simulations of your

forecast, before settling on your numbers.

This likely yields better forecasts and

improved business productivity because

you can plan how you operate your busi-

ness with greater precision.

Also, one of the traditional problems in

planning is the granularity at which youplan. Customer- and stock-keeping-unit-

level plans for profitability have

traditionally been troublesome due to per-

formance limitations. When SAP

NetWeaver BW is on SAP HANA with

the Planning Application Kit enabled, the

performance improvements allow you to

plan at a greater level of granularity.

For example, when planning customer and

product level profitability, the sheer pro-

cessing required for a top-down plan to

disaggregate to 100,000 customers and

50,000 products can generate 5 billion

record combinations for a disaggregation

operation. In the past, this type of process-

ing would have taken at the very least

an overnight process to calculate the

customer- and product-level granular plan

This approach is largely impractical prior

to using the Planning Application Kit, inwhich calculations have been moved into

memory. n

Prakash Darji is an experienced professional with more than 10 years of end-to-end experience in enterprise software. He has a broad depth of

experience including corporate strategy, sales, product management, architecture, and development. He has experience in product launch

activities, including positioning, packaging, and pricing. He has delivered numerous product releases in a variety of capacities through his

career. He thrives on building high-performing, scalable teams to achieve strategic deliverables, whether they close strategic sales deals, roll

in product features, or roll out new releases. He is a recurring author for several publications and a speaker at SAP conferences around the

world. Prakash is on LinkedIn at http://www.linkedin.com/in/prakashdarji

To contact the author, click here: Prakash Darji. If you have comments about this article or BI Expert, or would like to submit an article idea, please contact the

BI Experteditor.


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Using real-time data within SAP NetWeaver BWFigure 3

Reporting and analytics tools

SAP NetWeaver BW

SAP NetWeaver

BW schema

Non-SAP NetWeaver

BW schema

Composite provider

InfoCube

SAP HANA SAP HANA

Transient

InfoProvider

QueryQuery

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