SAP BW/4HANA architecture archetypes

becoming agile for the intelligent data warehouse

Juergen Haupt, SAP SE
May 22, 2018

PUBLIC
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Digital transformation –
the intelligent enterprise and the intelligent data warehouse
“Digital. I can define it in one sentence.
Digital is intelligently connecting
people, things, and businesses” Bill McDermott

Enterprise of today
BI/ Reporting Intelligent Analytics
Legacy DWH Is this transition reflected in Intelligent DWH
the BW/4HANA architectures
we see in the market?

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SAP BW/4HANA architectures in the market
from EDW approach to agile data warehouse and beyond

Agility Architecture Process Organization

Enterprise Data
Platform -
DWH on demand
SDUF* business
evolutionary, ownership
Increasingly sophisticated and
agile DWH incrementally demanding customers are
LSA++ driving businesses
to evolve agile, big-data-friendly
flexible,
simplified EDW
data warehousing and analytics
LSA++ environments
IT
BDUF* as all-inclusive
provider
waterfall
simplified EDW
LSA++

*Big Design Upfront *Sufficient Design Upfront

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Agile Data Warehousing, BI and Analytics – Agile Solutions
Agility derives from the right combination of business practices and technical capability

Agile solutions are those that have focused on a few key principles:
• Move to real-time solutions
• the death of waiting - businesses can no longer tolerate latency in their systems or processes,
• Build incrementally
• Forrester warns that “big bang approaches, including legacy enterprise data warehouses, have
a low chance of success.” …the more reasonable .. approach is to make the transformation in
phases.
• Ensure business ownership
• While IT will generally continue to own the infrastructure that supports an agile data warehouse,
the business owns the results that the new solution must provide. Ultimately, agility is a
problem that the entire organization must solve, and the business must take the lead.
• Realign IT priorities
• In the era of the agile data warehouse, IT takes on a new and very different role.” IT pros are no
longer responsible for building reports and dashboards. Instead, they empower their
business peers with self-service tools, platforms, and applications, enabling them to get
their own insights and turn these insights into action.”
© 2018 SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved. ǀ PUBLIC Neil McGovern, Senior Director, Product Marketing, SAP Data Warehousing 5
Digital transformation
an agile data warehouse as milestone to the intelligent data warehouse

Today Agile Analytics Intelligent Enterprise

Legacy DWH Agile DWH Intelligent DWH

Basic concepts of analytic agility*

• deliver fast, adaptable, responsive, and flexible business intelligence to business users
• reducing and ultimately eliminating the pipeline of data query requests that swamp IT
• without losing the key values that IT delivers, such as data consistency, security, etc.
• agile data marts underpin agile businesses, resulting in the ability of a business to change faster and
more profitably.

*Neil McGovern, Senior Director, Product Marketing, SAP Data Warehousing

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SAP BW/4HANA Customer Case – Introduction

▪ Fortune 100 US company

▪ One of the largest independent refiners and marketers of petroleum

products in the United States

▪ $20B+ revenue, 10,000+ employees worldwide (2016)

▪ Long experience with SAP BW

▪ SAP S/4HANA implementation in parallel

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SAP BW/4HANA Customer Case – Project Vision

Vision Architectural Considerations

A real-time enterprise data warehouse Replication vs. extraction vs. remote source
…that supports data lifecycle management Hot-warm-cold data storage (HANA,
and big-data BW/4HANA, DT, DTO, Hadoop)
…and facilitates self-service BI Structured and ad-hoc data discovery and
…something new, leading edge presentation:

✓ Access to all enterprise data

✓ Virtual data models, master data enrichment
✓ Data secured and consumed through
BW/4HANA
✓ Open to SAP and 3rd party front-end tools

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SAP BW/4HANA Layered Scalable Architecture (LSA++)
SAP BW/4HANA (LSA++)

Virtualization/ Virtual Data Marts mandatory

layer

Architected
Data Mart
bottom up Modelling
top down Modelling
Propagation Layer/
Integrated DWH
optional
layers depending
on business
Open ODS Layer/ needs
Raw DWH and required
service level
Staging Layer/
Corporate Memory

Source
Service Level

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SAP BW/4HANA Customer Case – Technical Layers

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SAP BW/4HANA Customer Case – Technical Overview

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SAP BW/4HANA Customer Case – Technical Overview

HANA Objects Count

Calculation View ~700 (Virtual Objects)
SDI Reptask ~70
SDI Flowgraph 3

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SAP BW/4HANA Customer Case – Technical Overview

BW Object Count
Open ODS Views 793 (Virtual Objects)
InfoObjects ~50
Advanced DSO 9
Composite Providers 99
BW Queries 253

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SAP BW/4HANA - virtual data marts
BW dynamic star schema
BW dynamic star schema keywords
Dimension Dimension
e.g. Product e.g. Customer  Persisted data (aDSO, table) defined by
Open ODS View-Master
InfoObject
Nav. Attributes
InfoObjects or Fields
Nav. Attributes
 Star Schema defined by CompositeProvider/
Open ODS View type fact
Facts
CompositeProvider/ Open ODS View-Fact
 Flexibility and agility – dynamic models
BW  CompositeProvider or Open ODS View type fact
Dynamic target-fields have
Star Schema  Free assignment of aDSO/ Table source elements
 Free Association of Dimensions i.e. InfoObject or Open
InfoObjects/ Fields
ODS View type master
Advanced DSO, DB-Table/ View
 Snow-flaking of master data (InfoObject transitive
Dimension Dimension attributes)
e.g. Location Time  Split of master data (Dimensions) – Dimension
Open ODS View-Master InfoObject
Nav. Attributes
Satellites
Nav. Attributes
virtual data mart modeling  BW dynamic star schema
 Flexibility – smoothly adopting changes
 Agility – integrating data virtually or physically with minimized IT efforts

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SAP BW/4HANA - dynamic star schema
CompositeProviders / Open ODS Views type fact combine dimension satellites

Split Dimension BW dynamic star schema keywords

– Satellites  Persisted data (aDSO, table) defined by
InfoObject
Nav. Attributes
InfoObjects or Fields
InfoObject InfoObject /Open ODS View
 Star Schema defined by a
Nav. Attributes Nav. Attributes CompositeProvider/ Open ODS View type
BW fact
Dimension e.g. Product
Dynamic  Flexibility and agility – dynamic models
Facts Star Schema  CompositeProvider or Open ODS View type
CompositeProvider/ Open ODS View-Fact fact target-fields have
 Free assignment of aDSO/ Table source elements
 Free Association of Dimensions i.e. InfoObject or
Open ODS View type master

InfoObjects/ Fields
 Snow-flaking of master data (InfoObject
Advanced DSO, DB-Table/ View*
transitive attributes)
 Split of master data (Dimensions) –
Dimension Satellites

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SAP BW/4HANA Customer Case – an ‘Enterprise Data Platform’

Characteristics
• Real-time data – replication vs. batch ETL
• Single data location
Semantic Layer
•
Bottom up Modeling

SAP BW/4HANA Query Fast and agile implementation

Virtual Data Marts • Evolutionary design – ‘playback sessions’
SAP BW/4HANA CompositeProvider • Business ownership

Transformations
SAP HANA Calc-Views
SAP HANA benefits
Replication Layer • Real-time data replication capabilities
(SAP HANA) • Flexible virtual modeling

Source SAP BW/4HANA benefits

data lake, on prem, cloud
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• Semantic model (master data, key figures/KPIs,
query definition, authorizations, …)
• OLAP features (e.g. exception aggregation)
• Prepared to easily scale into DW scenarios
• ‘We learned to appreciate InfoObjects’ (stable
fundament)
16
SAP BW/4HANA Customer Case – Hybrid Virtual Data Model

Model template
• Real-time data replication
• HANA Calculation Views used for
modeling (model layers, joins, etc.)
• Open ODS Views as virtual master data
model (fields)
• BW/4HANA Composite Providers used
as virtual data model for reporting
• BW/4HANA query as semantic layer (all
data consumed through BW/4HANA)

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SAP BW/4HANA Customer Case – Lessons Learned
• Agile methodology very effective and very fast paced. Hybrid
modeling contributed to the quick development. Analytics
always at the head of the game.
• Pragmatism and close involvement of business users
• e.g. exception aggregation doesn’t perform very well 
split models and queries
• Business users ask for ‘everything’ building expensive
solutions (education)
• Real-time replication eliminated need to configure and
enhance extractors and InfoObjects.
• Table structure changes in the source systems immediately
exposed and problematic in the BW/4HANA system.
• Combining data is the biggest challenge
• S/4HANA offers already digestible data
• All traditional challenges are still there….
• Best-practice guidelines needed for all development objects to
avoid inconsistencies and rework (object names, package and
InfoArea hierarchies, master data foundations, modeling
guidelines such as memory optimization and MD associations,
© 2018 SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved. ǀ PUBLIC query layout and filters, etc.) 18
 BW/4HANA set-up options and architecture

Agility
Architecture Process Organization
Enterprise Data
Platform -
DWH on demand
BW/4 Greenfield SDUF* business
evolutionary,
agile DWH ownership
incrementally
LSA++

flexible,
simplified EDW
LSA++
Legacy EDW - LSA

Meta data:
BW/4 Conversion
BW on AnyDB

Remote Conv. (shell) IT

BDUF* as all-inclusive
Meta data and data:
waterfall provider
Remote Conversion
simplified EDW
LSA++
In place Conversion

© 2018 SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved. ǀ PUBLIC *Big Design Upfront *Sufficient Design Upfront 19
SAP BW/4HANA and simplified Enterprise Data Warehouse
Semantic Layer
BW Query
Virtual Data Marts
Top down Modeling
BW CompositeProvider
Propagation Layer/
Integrated DWH (BW)
Transformations (BW)
Staging Layer/
Corporate Memory (BW)
Source
data lake, on prem, cloud
© 2018 SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved. ǀ PUBLIC
simplified EDW
Corporate data model
Single data location
Persisted integration
• Less layer - optional Staging Layer, obsolete persisted Data Marts
• Top Down modeling - InfoObjects
• Simplified modeling pattern – less objects
• High performance - staging and querying
• New degree of flexibility - Dynamic Star Schema
• Unified Time dimension – reusable, outrigger dimensions
• Powerful semantics –
• defined in InfoObjects
• defined in Query/ CompositeProvider
• … 20
SAP BW/4HANA and Enterprise Data Platform

Enterprise Data Platform

Real-time data
Semantic Layer Single data location
Bottom up Modeling

BW Query Virtual integration

Virtual Data Marts • Real time data - whenever possible
BW CompositeProvider
• Replication instead of extraction - whenever possible
Transformations
HANA Calc-Views • All data in a single location – single point of authorization
Replication Layer • Original data - no reconciliation issues
(HANA)
• Bottom up modeling
• self-service BI
Source
data lake, on prem, cloud • fields
• fail early

• Virtual, simple, cheap

• avoid/ no need for DWH persistence

© 2018 SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved. ǀ PUBLIC • HANA enterprise license 21
 SAP BW/4HANA greenfield versus conversion set-up
Why a conversion BW/4 architecture ?
Times are changing – conversion gives me the chance for a
guided transformation to a simplified EDW:
• Using latest technologies without disruption
• Simplified BW/4 modeling
• High performance querying and load
• Door-opener for
• big data
• data tiering
• Tight integration with SAC / SAP Data Hub
I have to observe that:
• I inherit the master data model what makes changes
towards flexibility difficult
• Real time solutions is an option for the future
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Why a Greenfield BW/4 architecture?
Times are changing – greenfield gives me the chance setting
up a modern up-to-date architecture – open doors:
• Using disruption of latest technologies
• The DWH from tomorrow will not be the same like today
• I must use this opportunity doing the first steps towards agile
solutions/ intelligent enterprise
• Self service analytics (SAC) , provisioning (Data Hub)
• SQL
• I will enable real-time/ low latency solutions
• ‘I do not want a traditional DWH’ – what means
• I do not want big design upfront
• I want an evolutionary approach
I have to observe that:
• I avoid fragmentation of an agile approach
• I deliver services like authorization
• I need a powerful semantic layer (BW query)
22
Analytics on Enterprise Data Warehouse or Enterprise Data Platform ?
Architecture directions are not mutual exclusive

Semantic Layer
BW Query
Semantic Layer
Virtual Data Marts
Top down Modeling

Bottom up Modeling
BW Query
BW CompositeProvider
Virtual Data Marts
Propagation Layer/ BW CompositeProvider
Integrated DWH (BW)
Transformations
Transformations (BW) HANA Calc-Views

Staging Layer/ Replication Layer

Corporate Memory (BW) (HANA)

Source Source
data lake, on prem, cloud data lake, on prem, cloud

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SAP BW/4HANA direction Agile Data Warehouse

Flexibility/
Agility

BW/4HANA
Agile Data Warehouse

DWH services/
De-fragmentation

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 From Enterprise Data Platform to SAP BW/4HANA Agile Data Warehouse

Semantic Layer Enterprise Data Platform

BW Query

Virtual Data Marts

Real-time data
Single data location
Virtual integration
+ Open ODS Layer/
Raw DWH (BW)
Bottom up Modeling

BW CompositeProvider

Transformations • a stable, independent, simple persistency

HANA Calc-Views
• Open ODS/ Raw Layer – ADSOs with fields
Open ODS Layer/
• Real time via streaming process chains
Raw DWH (BW)
• snapshot services
Replication Layer (HANA) • DWH- services in general
• hierarchies
Source
data lake, on prem, cloud

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 Making SAP BW/4HANA a flexible, simplified EDW

Semantic Layer
BW Query flexible, simplified EDW
Virtual Data Marts Corporate and evolutionary data model
Single data location
BW CompositeProvider Virtual and persisted integration

Transformations
HANA Calc-Views/ BW
Open ODS Layer/
+
Top down Modeling

Bottom up Modeling

Propagation Layer/ Raw DWH (BW)

Integrated DWH

Open ODS Layer/ simplified EDW

Corporate data model
+ Replication Layer
Raw DWH (BW) Single data location

Staging/ Replication Layer-

Persisted integration
+ Remote Integration/
Open ODS View/ SDA
Corporate Memory (BW/ HANA)

Source
+ Transformations
HANA Calc views

data lake, on prem, cloud

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SAP BW/4HANA modeling features for an agile data warehouse

Introduce persisted
modeling features to
Enterprise data platform

Introduce flexible
modeling features to
simplified EDW
 s. Teched 2017 HBD302 ‘SAP BW/4HANA Patterns for Modern
Data Warehousing and Flexible Modeling
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Thank you.
Contact information:
Juergen Haupt
Product Manager, SAP SE

juergen.haupt@sap.com