BI in SAP NetWeaver 2004s is the official abbreviation for the successor of the Business Information Warehouse (BW) which has been completely revised by SAP with its latest release. Core elements of this comprehensive suite for decision making applications are functions for extraction, transformation and data management. With this new release, these functions aim more heavily at company-wide data warehousing.
The book focuses on these core tasks of SAP BW and gives well-founded insights into the system architecture. As practical handbook and well-structured reference book, the book is for SAP consultants and IT staff that are responsible for or planning a BW-based data warehouse implementation.
Apart from system architecture, the book focuses on detailed descriptions of data management (data models and Analytical Engine) as well as the Staging Engine which have been completely revised and deal with new data transfer process technology. The design of the controlled operations has been substantially expanded and besides a comprehensive description of automization techniques by using process chains, regular maintenance and administration tasks are also discussed (model trimming, technical validation).
The book emphasizes a comprehensive view on aspects to manageability and system performance which are discussed in individual chapters but also implicitly in all other ranges of topics.
Customer Reviews & Comments
I really appreciate the detail of the book. It's one of the few books on BI that I have read with such thorough explanations. HOWEVER, the translation from German is extremely poor!!! I can speak German and could see that at places the text has been translated literally: with the verbs at the end of the sentence, which is typical for German. Very disappointing and also very annoying! At places you need to know prior knowledge of the subject to grasp the meaning, it's that bad! Recommend it only to people who already know BI pretty well. If it wasn't for the translation, I would give it 4.5 stars(although not technically possible), as Authorizations/Security and Data Mining part/APD are totally missing, as well as most of Reporting (for which i highly recommend Peter Jones' SAP Business Information Warehouse Reporting). For those going for SAP certification: this book, Jones' and help.sap.com for Security and APD is more than enough (that is if you dont have certification materials, which arent that good anyway). Hope that helps!
