Today's companies depend on data much stronger than any time before. However, the most important it is not to collect as much data as possible, but to analyze the already grabbed data in the most usable way. It's not easy - even the best systems by the widest worldwide organizations often are not enough for challenges only a bit more difficult than the basic. SAP Business Information Warehouse - as a whole, comprehensive system - has been designed to answer business users' all analytical requirements they could meet on their road to making further and further business decisions.

SAP Business Information Warehouse: Solution's architecture

The idea of SAP Business Information Warehouse has been to develop a universal data warehousing solution supplied with predefined and optimized data structures facilitating reporting and analysis. What else was a goal, was to keep the BI Warehouse a separate system and - by supplying it with numerous OLAP engine, tools, and others - make it a self-sufficient solution. Thereupon, the specialists decided to single out the three layers in the system's architecture: systems layer, BW server layer, and OLAP layer.

The source systems

The first layer - in the shortest - is the one responsible for supplying the whole Business Information Warehouse with the data. This can be considered equal to the ETL processing in the traditional data warehousing concept.

The BW Server

The second layer - BW Server - is the core of SAP Business Information Warehouse architecture. Once the data is loaded into the system (that's the role of extract, transform, and load processes), the SAP BW Server is responsible for its further processing and loading. However, it not only keeps control over the organization of data flow, but also helps with planning the load processes, and monitoring the system.

SAP BW OLAP

Once the data passes the first two layers, there is the third one which the final operations occur within. SAP BW OLAP layers consists therefore of a powerful Online Analytical Processing processor that answer all business users' analytical needs. With multi dimensional analysis provided and a wide set of differentiated tools, it ensures one gets exactly the results he's been looking for. And the three areas which the OLAP layer can be divided into are:

• BEx Analyzer
• BEx Web Application
• BEx Mobile Intelligence.

The three together are enough for each and every user to deliver the easily consumable reports exactly like he needs. Speaking wider, the Business Explorer - BEx from above - is a component designed to virtually "connect" users to the system. It integrates the whole portal, and takes care about queries, reporting, and analysis. With Web application design it simultaneously becomes truly easy to use and - therefore - efficient. What is more, it allows to manage the applications "from outside", via mobile phones or PDAs.

SAP Business Information Warehouse resources

• http://searchsap.techtarget.com/definition/Business-Information-Warehouse - the shortest usually is the easiest to understand. Thereupon, before reading anything else, one should pay attention to the definition by Techtarget which describes the SAP Business Information Warehouse. Even though there are only two paragraphs devoted to the solution, they could be considered quite an interesting introduction before diving deeper into solution details. Moreover, the whole part of Techtarget website (http://searchsap.techtarget.com/) can be considered a good source of knowledge about SAP as a whole organization and many its other products that may be (or not) connected to Business Information Warehouse, as well.
• http://www.sap-img.com/sap-bw.htm - here's quite an interesting source of technical knowledge about the Business Information Warehouse and SAP BW as a whole. Numerous hyperlinks, plenty of frequently asked questions answered, and a lot of suggestive tips. These all are the things which every Business Information Warehouse user could benefit from if only he's interested in something more than just how to generate the easiest report and - then - go to home. Beware, there's a lot of notes that might not be understandable to the very beginners, after all.
• http://www.erpgenie.com/sapfunc/bw.htm - here's the book about the SAP Business Information Warehouse solution. However, it's not accessible for free, it needs to be paid. Nonetheless, it might not be the worst option - once the Internet lacks for rightful sources of knowledge about the Business Information Warehouse purchasing a special book could be reasonable. Especially because there's quite a good description of what one could find inside.