SAP Data Warehousing Solutions: an octubre 2011 Review

Independientemente de los proveedores de software o hardware, el mercado de Data Warehousing es un área de crecimiento, que se espera que aumente aproximadamente 10.1% en CAGR (tasa de crecimiento anual compuesta) en 2015 según el último estudio realizado por IDC. SAP, gracias a la adquisición de Sybase, Gartner & Forrester lo considera un líder en el Data Warehouse. Este artículo se centra en las soluciones proporcionadas por SAP para organizaciones que buscan almacenes de datos orientados a la empresa o bases de datos de alto rendimiento más ágiles y para echar un vistazo a su hoja de ruta futura.

Almacén de datos empresariales

• SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse (BW): is nowadays a very stable product, with a large installed base and in constant growth (more than 12000 customers, more than 15000 productive systems), and what more it has not been affected by the economic downturn in 2009. If we look at its future evolution, it is intended to be running on HANA in 2012 which will be used as the underlying In-Memory database Platform (BW 7.3x SP5), this means to be based on an  already built-in Business Warehouse Accelerator.

Base de datos analíticos de alto rendimiento

• SAP HANA: is a flexible, data source agnostic, in-memory appliance that analyzes high volumes of transactional data in real-time. It includes tools for data modeling, data and lifecycle management, security and operations. It combines SAP software components which are optimized with the hardware provided by partners. The benefits are the following: make smarter business decisions supported by an increased visibility  of very large volumes of business information, react to business events more quickly through real-time analysis and reporting of operational data, a new application foundation for a new category of applications, streamline IT landscapes and finally reducetotal cost of ownership (TCO). If we look further  ahead in time, there will be a transition going from having SAP Business Objects BI 4.0 running on SAP HANA 1.0 to having the whole SAP Business Suite running on SAP HANA 2.0 in 2013.

• Sybase IQ: is a market leading, high-performance, columnar analytics server and data warehouse specifically designed for high speed data analytics, enabling high speed performance of complex queries against large datasets, with the advantage of being a low cost  maintenance when compared to row-based systems (by reducing the need for aggregates and indexes). It is a mature and proven solution with about 1900 customers and more than 3300 unique deployments. SAP will continue to support and invest on this acceleration technology, especially for non-SAP applications and data (including the possibility of placing SAP BusinessObjects BI on top).

• SAP BusinessObjects RapidMarts are preconfigured jumpstart data marts that are designed to accelerate BI. And they all come pre-packaged by subject areas and sub-areas specific to SAP modules (Finance, Manufacturing, Operations, HR, etc.) as well as for non-SAP applications (JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, Lawson, Oracle EBS, etc.). The key elements included are the following:

1. Asignaciones de ETL: asignaciones de origen a destino y transformación de datos para tablas de origen relevantes (movimientos de datos iniciales e incrementales).
2. Data Marts: conjunto de objetos y esquemas RDBMS de destino basados en las mejores prácticas para el modelado de datos dimensionales (Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, Teradata).
3. Contenido de BI: universos preconfigurados basados en las mejores prácticas y muestras de informes que muestran la gran cantidad de datos disponibles.

Si necesita más información sobre las soluciones presentadas aquí, no dude en publicar una respuesta o ponerse en contacto con Clariba.

SAP BusinessObjects: a través de los ojos de los críticos y los clientes

In our day-to-day life we are exposed to many purchasing decisions. Going to the supermarket to get some food or buying widgets in an internet shop is no longer a quick and easy task. The diversification of vendors forces us to go through a conscious or unconscious decision making process. It is always interesting to study the reasoning that leads to an action, especially for marketing people, and it is a social phenomenon in constant evolution, ranging from the traditional word of mouth to the most modern surfing of internet forums.

The same happens when a company has the opportunity to make a BI investment and has to choose a vendor that fulfills their particular needs. There are some specialized consulting companies that carry out complex market studies, but the feedback received from clients or contacts is just as influential to the decision making process.

This blog article is focused on the latest studies from Gartner and Forrester regarding SAP BusinessObjects.

The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms, released during the last quarter of 2010, considers SAP BusinessObjects to be leading the market together with IBM Cognos, Oracle and Information Builders, followed by SAS, Microsoft and MicroStrategy close behind. The 145 criteria used correspond to vendor surveys, product demos and customer reference surveys.  The end result is a graph that situates BI vendors in relation to their current offering and strategy.

SAP BusinessObjects is recognized as having very good BI tools for each job:

• Crystal Reports as top report writer embedded in thousands of applications;

• Explorer as a combination of the power of OLAP and the simplicity of search, exploration and analysis;

• SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards is very popular amongst executives that can visualize the generated flash in disconnected mode and no SAP software installed;

• BEx being still the most widely used and popular query and analysis tool for SAP BW users;

• Business Warehouse Accelerator with the speed of in-memory database to provide a powerful DBMS optimized for BI;

• SAP is also leading in self-service BI software as a service (SaaS) offerings.

According to Forrester, the downside of having all these tools is a poor product integration and a lack of object reuse from product to product, which is supposed to be improved with the new release BI 4.0 in Q1 2011.

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms, released in enero 2011, considers the same leader vendors as Forrester and also adds QlikTech thanks to its recent continued growth. It uses standard criteria divided into two categories: completeness of vision and ability to execute. According to the study, a good strength is to have the largest share of the BI platform market (combination of SAP NetWeaver BW and SAP BusinessObjects) with an installed base over 46,000 customers and one of the largest channel and services ecosystems. Reporting and ad-hoc querying capabilities were rated high by customers, whereas other SAP NetWeaver BW tools were below the market average. However, in regards to OLAP, BEx Analyzer seems to be more widely used than Voyager. The complements to the BI platform are also seen as positive: collaboration and decision support (StreamWork), Text Analysis, search-based data exploration with its Explorer product, and the enterprise information management products with data integration, lineage & impact analysis, and data quality. The vision for an in-memory appliance, HANA, promises to solve many of the perennial performance issues of large complex BI deployments in general (given its SQL and MDX access for third-party BI tools) and SAP BW in particular. As also reported by Forrester, SAP has been one of the first of the leading BI vendors to introduce a SaaS offering, BusinessObjects OnDemand BI. In addition, SAP has also made investments in mobile BI with its Sybase acquisition and the SAP BusinessObjects Explorer iPhone/iPad application.

In the cautions part of the report, Gartner mentions some concerns that customers have about the roadmap after product changes to support optimizations with the SAP Business Applications and NetWeaver BW products, and also a perceived higher cost of ownership. Migration, implementation and integration choices are reported to be confusing by some customers. Finally, ratings for support, software quality and sales experience are unfortunately low compared to other vendors in the survey. This is currently being address by SAP; they are giving more and more importance to Channel Partners like Clariba, which can provide high quality uninterrupted support, much more aligned to the customer needs.

If you have any questions or comments about the Gartner or Forrester summaries mentioned in this article, or would like more information about Clariba’s SAP BusinessObjects services, please leave a comment below or contact us at info@clariba.com.

Conexión de SAP BW y BusinessObjects Data Integrator para la extracción de datos

En el seguimiento de mi artículo de blog sobre julio 7, quisiera compartir algunas ideas para conectar SAP BW y SAP BusinessObjects Data Integrator con fines de extracción de datos.   

 El problema que encontré fue que no podía conectar mi BODS a SAP BW. La conexión se creó correctamente en la consola de administración de Data Integrator, pero la puesta en marcha siempre fallaba. 

Después de lo que parecía cientos de pruebas y comandos del cmd, encontré la solución: el archivo de servicios que se encuentra en la misma ruta que el archivo host (windows / system32 / drivers / etc) requiere un pequeño cambio:

1. Debe agregar la siguiente cadena SAPGWxx 33 xx / tcp donde xx es el número de sistema de su conexión SAP.
2. Entonces aquí también configuré el sapjco3.jar que se almacena en tomcat (lo encontrará con una búsqueda fácil en la carpeta) en el CLASSPATH de Tomcat según el tema anterior publicado en julio 7.

Para iniciar el servicio utilicé un comando desde el cmd en la ubicación: Drive: Business ObjectsBusiness Objects Data Servicesbin: RfcSvr -aRFC_ProgramID -g / H / ip o nombre del nombre del servidor de aplicaciones SAP / S / 33 xx -xsapgwxx RfcSvr Es el archivo .exe que inicia los procesos DI. Si quieres saber más detalles sobre este comando, la mejor manera es hacer una búsqueda rápida en Google.

Después de seguir los pasos anteriores, todo debería funcionar bien. En este punto, puede utilizar cubos BW como fuente de datos en Data Integrator.

Si tiene alguna pregunta o comentario que añadir a esta solución rápida, no dude en dejar un comentario a continuación.

Conexión entre SAP BW y Universe Designer / BusinessObjects InfoView

En esta publicación de blog, explicaré algunos consejos que aprendí al integrar SAP BusinessObjects Universe Designer / Infoview con SAP BW.

En su mayor parte, los pasos deben ser simples y bastante estándar (a menos que enfrente algunos problemas inesperados). En primer lugar, debe instalar la plataforma y el kit de integración para SAP. Al final de este proceso, verá que puede crear universos sobre cubos BW o consultas BW. Puede publicar fácilmente el universo y recuperar sus datos en un informe.

Ahora, en teoría, después de configurar al usuario en el CMC (BO CMC -> Autenticaciones -> SAP), un usuario debería poder iniciar sesión en SAP BusinessObjects InfoView utilizando sus credenciales de SAP ...

Pero en realidad, BusinessObjects fallará al importar los roles del usuario de SAP. ¿Por qué? Porque necesitará un conector java, que no viene con el kit de integración "listo para usar".

Todo lo que necesita hacer es descargar los archivos de SAP (o desde la parte inferior de esta publicación de blog) y ponerlos a disposición de su sistema. Aquí una guía paso a paso:

1. Cree las carpetas en su carpeta principal de tomcat55 llamada Sharedlib
2. Copie allí los archivos sapjco.jar y .dll
3. Copie los archivos .dll en Windows / system32
4. Vaya a la configuración de Tomcat y agregue la ruta completa del archivo sapjco.jar a la cadena CLASSPATH - reinicie tomcat

Notes: Do not confuse the sapjco.jar with other versions in the folder. Download the 32bit version even if your machine is a 64bit.   Now try to import your user's role in BO CMC --> Authentications --> SAP again and you will see that everything will work as expected.

Si tiene alguna pregunta o comentario sobre esta solución, hágamelo saber dejando un comentario a continuación.

> Download this Shared file (contains sapjco.jar and the .dll files)