"BW BEx -> IDT -> BO" or "BW export to HANA view -> IDT -> BO"

[Former Member]

Hello Gurus,

The customer I work for is planning on moving to a BW on HANA environment. One of the questions that came up was around usability of BO in the post-hana world. Unfortunately I could not get hold of any customer experience to get to a logical conclusion.

Option 1 ) We continue to use the standard approach. Consume data from BW BEx queries via BICS connection into Business OBjects

Option 2 ) The second option comes with the feature that BW on HANA provider. You could export an Infoprovider into a view inside HANA(it has a setting to be enable during activation). This would mean we the same data could be consumed from a column-view via a normal RDBMS connection.

In terms of better performance and a stable architectural approach, what could be a better suggestion  and why ...

Thanks,

Prabhu DC

[former_member278749]

Hello,

I recommand option 1, for many reasons:

a) BW security is kept with Bex. On Hana you have to implement a new security model

b) At teched 2015, BW 7.50 slides, you can see that Bex query designer is now in Eclipse. So it is still a pertinent, reliable approach to do Bex queries

c) BW on Hana with last version on both allow to push down in Hana the longest calculations (like KF with agregation exceptions) so as a result you have a similar speed comparing your 2 options.

Regards,

Julien

[Former Member]

Hello,

All valid points indeed. In-case of option 2, security and re-creation of reporting logic with a native flavor is indeed required. But we are planning on doing that anyways because of native modelling done in scenarios not related to data in BW at all.

But I guess you are right that we got to carefully look at each requirement and solve specifically.

[patrick_winkler]

Hello,

if you go with option 2), you should carefully consider what you are loosing in terms of BW Query functionality. If you expose the BW data on a InfoProvider level, you have to re-create all the BW Query functionality on your own in HANA, or on a different application layer, which is hardly feasible for many functions such as exception aggregation, constant selection, zero sum suppression etc.

While you can also expose the BW Query directly as a HANA view,

Generating SAP HANA Views for Queries - Using the SAP HANA Database - SAP Library

, this has also severe limitations.

So I would recommend to look at the BW Query features you need. If you cannot replicate them with HANA native means you should stay with option 1).

Regards,

  Patrick

[former_member274567]

Hi, Prabhu.

I wish I had an answer, but I just have a similar question.  We have a customer considering moving from a BEX environment to HANA, and wants some use cases that would justify the move, and perhaps some customer stories.  So far, I have come up dry.

If you should trip over anything that would help us, please let me know, and I will do the same for you.

Thanks, Prabhu.

Steve Phelan (not a guru)