BI in SAP NetWeaver 2004s is the official designation for the successor of the Business Information Warehouse (BW), which has been completely revised by SAP with its latest release. Core areas of this comprehensive suite for decision-making applications are functions for extraction, transformation, and data management. With this new release, these functions aim more heavily at company-wide data warehousing.

This book focuses on these core areas of SAP BW and gives well-founded insights into the system architecture. SAP consultants and IT staff who are responsible for or planning a BW-based data warehouse implementation will be well-served by this practical handbook and well-structured reference book.

In addition to system architecture, there are detailed descriptions of data management (data models and analytical engine), as well as the staging engine, which have been completely revised and deal with new data transfer process technology.

Coverage includes the substantially expanded design of controlled operations, as well as a comprehensive description of automization techniques by using process chains. Regular maintenance and administration tasks, such as model trimming and technical validation, are also discussed.

A comprehensive view on aspects of manageability and system performance is given in individual chapters, but these topics are also implicitly adressed throughout the whole book.

Target group:

• IT-Consultants, IT-Managers, SAP-Specialists, SAP-Consultants

Author / Authors:

Christian Mehrwald has been working in the area of data warehousing for more than ten years. He introduced SAP Business Intelligence (BI) solutions during the first pilot installations in Germany. Since 2001 he has been a partner at the BI-specialist company, quadox AG located in Walldorf, Germany. He is now working as a senior consultant responsible for projects in the SAP BI area. His main focus is on the planning of large-scale data warehouses and on fine-tuning BI systems.

In addition to his consulting work, Mehrwald trains and coaches new project managers as well as project staff. He has authored several books on SAP BI, published in Germany.

Sabine Morlock is a translator and management assistant. She has been living in Germany and Canada and worked in different roles in the consulting industry and in the financial sector. Sabine currently holds a staff role in a software company and assumes selected translation projects in her spare time.