Well the new buzz word in the world of SAP-BI is the HANA and the BW 7.3.
HANA has never been tested live but with my experiences HANA is the power performance booster. I have tested activating a HANA optimized DSO which has around a 5 Million records and the DSO activated in less than 2 mins.
Still excited about how HANA helps with the huge volumes of Data Loads and Reports.
The HANA optimized schema shows how simplified the modeling is and faster the loads are.
How to get a HANA Optimized InfoCube?
In the InfoCube maintanance screen GoTo Menu -> "Conversion to SAP HANA Optimized or via Program RSDRI_CONVERT_CUBE_TO_INMEMORY
Simplified Modeling:
Dimensions as grouping sets of characteristics are still available in the InfoCube modeling, but they are pure metadata now. They donot impact the physical representation on the database which means there will be no more "badely" modelled Infocubes with huge dimension tables and its impact on report and loading performance. There are no more line-item dimensions as all characters are physically line items now, and hence we no more need to set high cardinality flag.
Faster Loading:
Loading in this new schema is faster than the extended star schema of BW. On an average we have seen that loading into HANA-Optimized Infocube is 3-5 times faster than into the standard InfoCubes.
BW 7.3
There are many new things coming with the 7.3.
As a developer, the new 7.3 version with its smarter data flow modeling will remarkable reduce manual effort. It has a new Data Flow generation wizard which would help you to create a simple data flow together with the InfoProvider and any required InfoObjects all at one place.
With the 7.3 we have a new InfoProvider which is the Hybrid Provider which consists of a DSO and InfoObjects and automatically generated dataflow between these two objects. During run time it combines the historic data from the InfoCube with the latest data in DSO to get near real-time reporting before loading the data into the InfoCube.
The InfoCube in this version can be "Symantically Partitioned" based on the characteristics to improve the query performance. With Symantic Partitioning the system automatically generates corresponding modeling objects like the DTP(including respective filter criteria), Transformation and Process Chain aswel.
