Coming to the end of the little blog series (The diary of a BW 7.3 Ramp-Up project (Part 1), The diary of a BW 7.3 Ramp-Up project (Part 2), The diary of a BW 7.3 Ramp-Up project (Part 3),
The Diary of a BW 7.3 Ramp-Up project (Part 4), 'Force Delta' in BW Dataflows) I will shortly return to the technical stuff. As I know many of
you face the same issues when it comes to process chain scheduling. Of course,
there are tools available such as Control-M, UC4 ... just to name two of them,
but in case you don't have these tools implemented and you have to schedule the chains directly in your system, you will have the same issues as we have. E.g. a chain should only run on the 6th and 9th workday of a month, a chain should run every 2 hours, but not between 1:00pm and 7:00pm, a chain should run daily but not on saturdays.... You can achieve this by creating a separate factory calendar for each requirement and scheduling the chains based on the special factory calendar. To achieve all this plus some more options, we created our own process chain scheduling program. This program als has the advantage that, in case of a system down time, you only stop the program and no chain will run unless the program gets restarted.
But now, coming to the conclusion, I would say that BW 7.3 is a pretty stable system, even as we had some trouble after installing SP03. BW 7.3 comes with a lot of new features in the admin workbench which makes life a lot easier. We didn't use all of them, but in our first step we started with the data flow copy functionality, the SPOs and the graphical dataflow design tool. All of them are working pretty well. Only the SPOs might work faster and more flexible when it comes to the dtp generation.
As a resume I would recommend using BW 7.3 and look forward to implement BO 4.0.
For all of you interested in some more, there will be a webinar in the next weeks
and in addition we can talk at TechEd Madrid which I plan to attend.
