Week 1 Open SAP Course BW Powered by HANA

[TammyPowlas]

I just completed week 1 of this course - you can still register at SAP Business Warehouse powered by SAP HANA - Marc Hartz and Ulrich Christ

I did things a little backwards, I watched lothar.henkes introduction video last, even after completing the assignment.  Having started work in BW 3.x, I would say the changes to BW covered in the course are far greater than the initial change of going from BW 3.x to BW 7.0.  This slide says it all:

Source: SAP

You can see from the above that the Composite Provider is the "successor" to the MultiProvider and the InfoSet.  The presenters said the Composite Provider can do inner joins.

Bigger too is no more InfoCubes.  The speaker also said you can migrate your existing BW models to BW on HANA without remodeling.

The other big change is Eclipse-based development.  This is consistent with the HANA Studio.

You also hear the question asked "If I have HANA, do I still need BW on HANA"?  I wondered this myself yesterday while completing the Design Studio exercises which were based on HANA Calculation Views.  This question is answered in week 1 of the course.

I encourage you to carefully listen to everything the presenters say in this course.  Even if you don't have a background in BW but will be consuming BW in the future I think this course provides a great background to get you started.

This course reminds me of how I first learned BW many moons ago - in my previous job the BW team quit, and I had to learn BW quick.  I used this book: BW: A Step by Step Guide - Amazon says I purchased the book back in 2002.  The Week 1 instruction covers the basic concepts of BW, the foundation, the modeling, provisioning and more.

Another course tip is you can speed up or slow down the videos - I didn't know you could do that but I notice this today - see below:

However, I do not recommend doing that for this course; carefully listen to everything they have to say.  Also pay attention to the 62 slides provided.

Also, I didn't see any system exercises for this course for week 1, even though I see an entry for it in the Cloud Appliance Library - see below:

I activated OpenSAP BW Powered by HANA but it seemed to have the same image and guide from the previous entry OpenSAP BI Clients & Applications on SAP HANA.  Maybe this will get resolved next week.

In the introduction Lothar Henkes says it will take about 4 hours per week to complete the course.  I encourage you to sign up to today at SAP Business Warehouse powered by SAP HANA - Marc Hartz and Ulrich Christ - it is free.  There is no marketing with this course, it's all about what the product can do.