From SAP BW to SAP BW/4HANA

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SAP BW- Business Warehouse

SAP BW, before coming under HANA platform was having many pitfalls. One of the major ones is that it has multiple layers of redundant data and transforming data which slow done the data processing work. It took much time for data to reach the final destination of the reporting layer from source as it has to pass from multiple layers. Of-course the job would be completed but not fast.

SAP BW to SAP BW/4HANA – Major difference and Updates

After having many downsides of SAP BW, SAP launched HANA. It is a revolutionary database works on the cloud platform. SAP put BW on HANA platform putting off from the traditional database, resulting in redesigning of BW development.

This is called as SAP BW on HANA.  The initial version of SAP BW on HANA 7.3 was mainly focused on reducing the layers and speeding up the load time. Though these improvements helped a lot, there were still many issues which were required to deal with. Later version 7.4 tried to reduce complexities by reducing the number of development objects. The data model too started to be moved from traditional GUI to HANA studio environment.

Then came version 7.5 which stands out to be the most updated version till this point. SAP BW on HANA 7.5 has stronger and more efficient architecture and provides the base for the development of SAP BW/4HANA. SAP BW/4HANA looks almost similar to SAP BW on HANA however Sap BW/4HANA stands out to be more efficient than SAP BW on HANA.

Difference between SAP BW on HANA 7.5 and SAP BW/4HANA

The primary difference between BW on HANA and BW/4HANA is that BW/4HANA no longer supports those old objects like InfoCubes and DSOs. If a customer wishes to move to BW/4HANA, they need to convert all such legacy objects into newer BW/4HANA objects. SAP provides programs that can do this conversion but there will be some pre-migration effort to clean up everything that is no longer supported before moving to BW/4HANA.

Another difference is that SAP VW has been shifted from traditional GUI to HANA studio and now the data modeling is taken place in HANA studio. Though this migration has been started from SAP BW 7.4, it is almost at its completion in SAP BW/4HANA.

One of the downsides of SAP BW/4HANA is that it doesn’t support planning applications due to which customers need to wait for future updates for migration.

BW Perspectives in HANA Studio

SAP HANA Studio consists of different perspectives one of them is BW perspective which allows users to use HANA studio for development instead of SAP GUI. BW Perspectives is the same tool which we use for developing native HANA information view like calculation views.