SAP

In the SAP BI world ,we are all aware that the BI Accelerator (now termed BWA- BW Accelerator) works very well for queries with huge data volumes.

In this blog I would like to share our Infosys experience on using BO Front end Tools in combination with BIA and its effect on queries on top of datamarts with huge volumes.

The SAP Integration kit is used to interface BO and SAP and at the Infosys Lab we tried this integration with BO Front end Tools such as WebI, Crystal & Xcelsius.

The integration layer helps BO access the database using a semantic layer called Universe,which is typically built using the BO Universe designer.

Main components of the integration kit include , Database drivers for Data access,SAP authentication to map existing SAP roles to BO enterprise ,Transport files to connect SAP to BO and BW publisher to publish reports from BW to BO enterprise

A brief summary of the response times of the BO reports on BIA enabled cubes is as follows -

WebI has shown an improvement of around 44 times with BIA , Voyager has shown only around 16 times whereas Crystal performed significantly better with an improvement factor of around 87% on Sales Cubes having around 100 million .

A note on Voyager which caters to aggregated data, the performance improvement with BIA is huge while expanding each dimension object ( drill-down or drill-across), even though the time to access the first dimension is almost same with or without BIA.

With SAP further refining its integration aspects of BO and SAP BW , the above results are definitely set to get better.

Also read Infosys white-paper on BIA using link below

http://www.infosys.com/SAP/thought-leadership/SAP-NetWeaver-BI-Accelerator.pdf