Experiencing Week 2 Open SAP BW On HANA Course

[TammyPowlas]

Last week Week 1 Open SAP Course BW Powered by HANA I was looking for the exercises/instance for the course.  It turns out there are no formal exercises.  This is good because I don't feel compelled to complete anything beyond the lectures.  But looking closely at the cover page at SAP Business Warehouse powered by SAP HANA - Marc Hartz and Ulrich Christ they do list an instance at http://www.saphana.com/bwonhanatrial

I went to http://www.saphana.com/bwonhanatrial but when I brought up the Getting Started Guide (which is very well documented) the exercises don't correlate with what you learn in Week 2.  After reviewing the exercises I decided to terminate my instance (quickly).

Week 2 is all about the new Advanced Data Store Object and in certain modeling situations you don't need the InfoObject any more.  The instructors made the case that this was for agile BI; they listened to customers who had data source of over 220 fields and before you needed to manually create an InfoObject for each one (painful and tedious).

Time is spent on provisioning in areas that I haven't used before:

Source: SAP

Open ODS views allow you to model without InfoObjects.

Source: SAP

Most of the demonstrations are on BW 740 SP08; I tried following along in my own sandbox system which is on BW 740 SP04 and it was impossible due to all the enhancements and changes.

For example, here is the new RSA7 transaction shown during class:

ABAP Managed Database Procedures (AMDP) are covered with the transformations.  I confess, all my ABAP knowledge and use with BW came from a SAP Press book so I continue to have a lot to learn.

Overall there is still so much to learn that was covered here - logical data warehouse, how BW on HANA can support the "Big Data" and Hadoop scenarios.  Interesting too, any time the instructors did a "query" against BW on HANA they used Analysis for Office; I was expecting a BEx Query.

I think I will have to go back and watch these videos again once I get a system that is on SP08; still I thank the instructors and SAP for filling these videos with so much knowledge.  Again, this openSAP course is all about what the product can do and no marketing - kudos!