Near Line Storage ( NLS ) Archival with SAP BW - Part 2

[ankush_hallan2]

Part 2 of this blog series will cover some more important aspects of NLS technology

with SAP BW

1) A prerequisite of NLS data archival is to compress the InfoCubes that you want to

archive upto the latest data load request before archival . In many landscapes

this is normally done as part of maintenance activities but if not then this might be

a time consuming process to implement on all cubes and might impact project

timelines .

2) Many times a question is asked about NLS whether archived data on NLS can be

again restored back to the live SAP BW system . The answer is "Yes"  this is

possible but might lead to inconsistencies in the system and will defeat the purpose

of archival . Data reload option should be used only if there is a critical business need .

3) From a BW security perspective there are some prerequisites as well .    

For BW developers to perform archival related activities under developer role,

authorization object S_ARCHIVE needs to be assigned and activity code , area

and object should be '*' .

For End Users: To read archived data from NLS , users should have authorization Object

S_RS_ADMWB with Activity Code 03,16 assigned and restricted on Object RSADMWBOBJ

These prerequisites might be specific to NLS vendors as well and you need to provide

additional authorizations if mentioned in documentation provided by your NLS vendors .

4) Another important step which is a part of NLS archival is the creation of virtual

InfoCubes . To read the data from NLS you will need to create new virtual cubes

which will actually connect to NLS . If a query is run which needs to read data from

NLS then these virtual cubes will do the trick . You would need to modify the existing

Multi Providers and queries to include these virtual cubes so that data archived on

NLS is available for reporting .

Will cover some more aspects in the next part of this series

Cheers !