"been acutely frustrated with BW " Funny how almost anyone I've ever spoken
to about BW has uttered this same phrase. I knew I was in trouble when SAP
shipped me the install CD's...all 35 of them.
I honestly do not have enough experience with BW to offer a real opinion but
everyone I talk to that does, does not think too highly of it.
--
Ray Higdon MCSE, MCDBA, CCNA
---
"Belinda" <belindacur_at_yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:41af5e48.0402190341.5dfae7f4_at_posting.google.com...
> If there is anybody out there still looking for a comparison of SAP BW
> to SQL Server I would like to let you know we were one of the large
> SAP BW sites and having been acutely frustrated with BW we converted
> to SQL Server OLAP Services. There is a interesting Whitepaper on the
> Microsoft SAP Congress web site created by SAP themselves where they
> have benchmarked a SQL Server and OLAP Services running on a 8 way NT
> box outperformed SAP BW systems ruuning on 24 way UNIX databases-what
> better testimony than from SAP themselves. Further, SAP's findings
> were the BW cubes moved to SQL Server OLAP services were 10 times
> smaller this shows the appalling BW technology. If you have trouble
> finding this benchmark paper let me know.
>
> After seeing the results of a pilot migration we migrated our entire
> SAP BW applications to SQL server OLAP services at that Oracle 9i OLAP
> was still not in General availability but if you are thinking of a
> alternative now worthwhile to evaluate Oracle 9i OLAP & SQL Server
> OLAP services to the white elephant SAP BW. You will discover after
> this how many more less than average intelligence customers with less
> than average commonsense are running this SAP white elephant called
> SAP BW paying fortune to SAP.
>
> Nigel Pendse as published a very interesting article on SAP BW a
> worthwhile article to read if you are already being bled dry by SAP.
>
> Belinda
>
>
>
> From: Amanda Jones (amandajonesbc_at_lycos.com)
> Subject: SAP BW compared to Essbase/SQLServer/Oracle as a Enterprise
> Data Warehouse & OLAP application
>
>
> View this article only
> Newsgroups: comp.databases.olap, comp.databases.oracle.marketplace,
> comp.databases.oracle.server, microsoft.public.sqlserver.datawarehouse
> Date: 2003-01-11 01:37:30 PST
>
>
> Hello All
>
> My company as asked me to prepare and evaluate between alternative
> solutions for data warehousing and one of our major source system to
> the data warehouse is SAP R/3 but of course we have other source
> systems apart from SAP.
>
> I am wondering how good is SAP Business Warehouse - BW 30B the latest
> version of SAP BW as a solution. I have personally talked to quite a
> few customers using SAP BW I could not get a good feedback about the
> product from SAP customers. Some of the customers indicated following
> issues with SAP BW:
> -difficult to use
> -went through long implementation cycles
> -performance was poor and scalability issues
> -maintaining the application was expensive since SAP BW and ABAP
> consultants are needed for ongoing maintenance.
>
> Apart from it we figured out SAP BW 30B does not have any ETL tool in
> it with ETL being 70-80% of the data warehousing effort I am bit
> sceptical how BW can run without a proper ETL tool. The part that
> caused us most concern was the language to extract, transform and load
> in SAP BW was ABAP and ABAP is proprietary which would cause us a
> major steep cost of ownership even for initial implementation to
> ongoing maintenance since our SAP project was not easy to implement
> and ABAP programmers are not available for less that $1000/day. So we
> would need expensive ABAP programmers to develop extractors for SAP
> R/3.
>
> Next configuring SAP BW needed specialist SAP BW consultants and we
> found out good SAP BW consultants were hard to get and getting
> consulting help from SAP would cost us - $2000/day. Apart from this
> the reporting layer in SAP BW was Microsoft Excel and any programming
> of the reporting was all done in ABAP again and for projecting reports
> Crystal reports was available but we had to buy a seperate license for
> Crystal reports and indications was in addition to SAP BW we had to
> buy a CPU based license for Crystal in addition. Since, we have
> non-SAP data sources to integrate into the data warehouse we were told
> we need a ETL tool like Ascential and we are to buy a seperate license
> to buy Ascential
> ETL tool once more CPU based licensing. Apart from buying a ETL tool
> like Ascential customers who had to build ETL to SAP BW have built
> part of the ETL process the extraction layer in Ascential and the
> transform and load part was written in ABAP for performance and that
> was the only solution for doing transforms and loads was to use ABAP
> programming.
>
> So in all staffing requirements we found for SAP BW to implement a
> enterprise data warehouse was we need :
> Read the rest of this message... (146 more lines)
>
> Message 2 in thread
> From: Nigel Pendse (nigelp_at_nospam.compuserve.com)
> Subject: Re: SAP BW compared to Essbase/SQLServer/Oracle as a
> Enterprise Data Warehouse & OLAP application
>
>
> View this article only
> Newsgroups: comp.databases.olap, comp.databases.oracle.marketplace,
> comp.databases.oracle.server, microsoft.public.sqlserver.datawarehouse
> Date: 2003-01-11 02:18:11 PST
>
>
>
> "Amanda Jones" <amandajonesbc_at_lycos.com> wrote in message
> news:d42580f.0301110137.5d6bdcca_at_posting.google.com...
> > Hello All
> >
> > My company as asked me to prepare and evaluate between alternative
> > solutions for data warehousing and one of our major source system to
> > the data warehouse is SAP R/3 but of course we have other source
> > systems apart from SAP.
> <snip>
>
> > Precisely I am wondering why not Oracle 9i OLAP or SQL Server 2000 or
> > Oracle/SQL Server with Hyperion Essbase/Cognos. Some of the SAP BW
> > consultants claim SAP BW is better than Business Objects, Cognos or
> > Hyperion. Can you please throw some light and compare SAP BW to
> > 9iOLAP/MicrsoftOLAP2000/Essbase/BO/Cognos & Acta/Informatica and if
> > any of you are using any of these alternative solutions can you please
> > provide your experiences with these alternatives to SAP BW like Acta
> > with Essbase/Oracle/Cognos or SQL Server and if there are any resource
> > on the net which outline how to evaluate a data warehouse.
>
> The OLAP Survey 2 also confirmed the low success rates of SAP BW
> users.
> Using an index based on eight separate benefits, SAP BW users reported
> the
> lowest scores among the nine products which had enough respondents to
> report. They also had the second lowest achievement of business goals
> among
> the same group. They also had an above-average rate of reporting
> technical
> problems (worse than any of the other products on your list).
>
> But, bizarrely, they also had the greatest loyalty -- presumably, many
> SAP
> R/3 sites have a fanatical loyalty to the vendor (after having
> invested so
> much), and despite the poor experiences of BW, are reluctant to
> consider
> third party alternatives, even though *all* the third party
> alternatives
> perform better.
>
> The same survey found that SAP BW users were the least likely to have
> performed a competitive product evaluation of all (only 24% of the BW
> sites
> surveyed had done this, against an average of 50%). This suggests that
> if
> people actually take the trouble to do what you're doing, they soon
> discover
> better alternatives and are able to achieve better results, more
> quickly and
> at lower cost. Largely, it's people who just assume BW "must be good
> because
> it's from SAP" who buy it, and then find it doesn't deliver. Of
> course, that
> same group probably don't realize how much better off they could have
> been
> if they'd bought something else.
>
> Because there are so many well-heeled R/3 sites, you'll find that all
> the
> independent BI vendors have put a lot of effort into ensuring that
> they can
> work well with R/3. Of the ones on your list, probably the only one
> not to
> consider at this stage is 9i OLAP, which is still somewhat unfinished.
> It
> may be good in a year or so, but currently has no apps available, and
> few
> tools. Consequently, there are currently very few deployments of it.
>
> Nigel Pendse
> OLAP Solutions
> http://www.olapreport.com
> http://www.survey.com/products/olap2/
> Message 3 in thread
> From: DA Morgan (damorgan_at_exesolutions.com)
> Subject: Re: SAP BW compared to Essbase/SQLServer/Oracle as a
> Enterprise Data Warehouse & OLAP application
>
>
> View this article only
> Newsgroups: comp.databases.olap, comp.databases.oracle.marketplace,
> comp.databases.oracle.server, microsoft.public.sqlserver.datawarehouse
> Date: 2003-01-11 11:06:13 PST
>
>
> Amanda Jones wrote:
>
> > Hello All
> >
> > My company as asked me to prepare and evaluate between alternative
> > solutions for data warehousing and one of our major source system to
> > the data warehouse is SAP R/3 but of course we have other source
> > systems apart from SAP.
> >
> > I am wondering how good is SAP Business Warehouse - BW 30B the latest
> > version of SAP BW as a solution. I have personally talked to quite a
> > few customers using SAP BW I could not get a good feedback about the
> > product from SAP customers. Some of the customers indicated following
> > issues with SAP BW:
> > -difficult to use
> > -went through long implementation cycles
> > -performance was poor and scalability issues
> > -maintaining the application was expensive since SAP BW and ABAP
> > consultants are needed for ongoing maintenance.
> >
> > Apart from it we figured out SAP BW 30B does not have any ETL tool in
> > it with ETL being 70-80% of the data warehousing effort I am bit
> > sceptical how BW can run without a proper ETL tool. The part that
> > caused us most concern was the language to extract, transform and load
> > in SAP BW was ABAP and ABAP is proprietary which would cause us a
> > major steep cost of ownership even for initial implementation to
> > ongoing maintenance since our SAP project was not easy to implement
> > and ABAP programmers are not available for less that $1000/day. So we
> > would need expensive ABAP programmers to develop extractors for SAP
> > R/3.
> >
> > Next configuring SAP BW needed specialist SAP BW consultants and we
> > found out good SAP BW consultants were hard to get and getting
> > consulting help from SAP would cost us - $2000/day. Apart from this
> > the reporting layer in SAP BW was Microsoft Excel and any programming
> > of the reporting was all done in ABAP again and for projecting reports
> > Crystal reports was available but we had to buy a seperate license for
> > Crystal reports and indications was in addition to SAP BW we had to
> > buy a CPU based license for Crystal in addition. Since, we have
> > non-SAP data sources to integrate into the data warehouse we were told
> > we need a ETL tool like Ascential and we are to buy a seperate license
> > to buy Ascential
> > ETL tool once more CPU based licensing. Apart from buying a ETL tool
> > like Ascential customers who had to build ETL to SAP BW have built
> > part of the ETL process the extraction layer in Ascential and the
> > transform and load part was written in ABAP for performance and that
> > was the only solution for doing transforms and loads was to use ABAP
> > programming.
> >
>
> Read the rest of this message... (161 more lines)
>
> Message 4 in thread
> From: timgale (timgale_at_rogers.com)
> Subject: Re: SAP BW compared to Essbase/SQLServer/Oracle as a
> Enterprise Data Warehouse & OLAP application
>
>
> View this article only
> Newsgroups: comp.databases.olap, comp.databases.oracle.marketplace,
> comp.databases.oracle.server, microsoft.public.sqlserver.datawarehouse
> Date: 2003-01-14 14:59:01 PST
>
>
>
> My background is a little different having been a Cognos reseller for
> the
> past 6 years. I am lead to believe by the guru's that be that Cognos
> has a
> few solutions for SAP and/or SAP BW...
>
> You can buy and use Cognos "headstarts" for SAP BW which will give
> users all
> the benefits of the Cognos client against SAP's Data Warehouse.
> However, I
> believe that the user can not perform OLAP disconnected.
>
> You can use Cognos against the info cubes in BW but you lose your ad
> hoc
> query and drill through capabilities. All you get is OLAP. Performance
> may
> also be an issue as PowerPlay is connecting through an odbc type
> interface
> (ODBO?) which is yet another point of failure. Also, you then are
> dependant
> on both vendors for connectivity through various releases.
>
> You can purchase analytical applications for SAP from Cognos which
> uses
> Cognos Decision Stream for ETL (solves your multiple data sources
> problem)
> and takes advantage of Decision Stream functionality for slowly
> changing
> dimensions, conforming dimensions, etc. Also, there is a TON of
> business
> content for Inventory, Procurement, Sales, AR, GL, and AP. It's an end
> to
> end Data Warehouse and Business Intelligence offering that is quick to
> implement. Having said all that, I've tried to convince many SAP shops
> of
> the above and they are extremely loyal to the ERP vendor. I'm not sure
> why.
> Typically an ERP vendor's sales force is plugged into the executive
> buyers
> which helps set an ERP agenda despite a favourable Cognos IT
> recommendation.
> Also note that Cognos was a licensed reseller for ACTA a few years ago
> so
> presumably they learned a thing or two about SAP data sources.
>
> Cognos resources are available in most major cities either from Cognos
> or
> through a systems integrator. Also, Cognos resources are available on
> a
> contract/permanent basis (at least in Toronto) through most agencies
> or on
> the open market.
>
> Personally, I think Cognos Analytical Applications are the best bet
> but I've
> been programmed to think that way:-)
>
> Hope that information is helpful.
>
> Cheers!
> Tim
>
>
>
> "Amanda Jones" <amandajonesbc_at_lycos.com> wrote in message
> news:d42580f.0301110137.5d6bdcca_at_posting.google.com...
> > Hello All
> >
> > My company as asked me to prepare and evaluate between alternative
> > solutions for data warehousing and one of our major source system to
> > the data warehouse is SAP R/3 but of course we have other source
>
> Read the rest of this message... (194 more lines)
>
> Message 5 in thread
> From: Ihre_Frage (Ihre_Frage_at_yahoo.de)
> Subject: Re: SAP BW compared to Essbase/SQLServer/Oracle as a
> Enterprise Data Warehouse & OLAP application
>
>
> View this article only
> Newsgroups: comp.databases.olap, comp.databases.oracle.marketplace,
> comp.databases.oracle.server, microsoft.public.sqlserver.datawarehouse
> Date: 2003-01-16 09:25:31 PST
>
>
>
> Hello Amanda,
>
> having lately had a look on all major multidimensional and relational
> OLAP systems I can just agree to all the statements regarding BW:
>
> > > -difficult to use
> > > -went through long implementation cycles
> > > -performance was poor and scalability issues
> > > -maintaining the application was expensive since SAP BW and ABAP
> > > consultants are needed for ongoing maintenance.
>
> you stated. At the moment there are only three reasons to implement
> SAP BW: 1. Your source data originates from SAP R/3 (at least 85 %).
> 2. Your users only know SAP R/3 reporting and are not "spoiled" by
> front ends from Cognos, Hyperion, Oracle, etc. or there are mainly (3)
> users receiving reports delivered by SAP's Business Explorer Web
> Application Builder (which is quite good).
>
> Why 1? Because SAP BW offers predefined extractors to extract data
> from R/3. Be careful though since any additionaly created field in R/3
> won't be covered by the extractors and need to be created manually. If
> you won't employ BW there will be no way around an ETL tool and
> consultants who know exactly where and how they get the data from
> (using routines that use the R/3 application by creating ABAP code
> through the ETL tool). The question is where you want to put the
> effort: In data extraction from R/3 or in maintaining your warehouse
> application server, the latter called BW. The options you stated with
> the ETL tools and their analytical apps form one scenario. Using the
> ETL tool, filling a database and employing separate front end tools is
> another. You are also comparing multidimensional and relational
> databases: In my oppinion you should see if you need the first or the
> latter to meet your requirements. This depends largely on the data
> volumes you want to handle. Data volume, #users and your required
> performance influence the decision which system and what platform to
> use. "Neutral" warehouse vendors like SAS, IBM, Microsoft or Oracle
> could do. Some of them even have "ETL" functionality built in which is
> quite good, like SAS or Oracle.
>
> Regarding the front ends: There are indeed 3rd party front ends
> available for BW. The problem is just that the ODBO implementation is
> very often different from SAP's (although they have certified
> interfaces). OLAP BAPI gives less hazzles but only two vendors are
> certified. It is not correct though, that programming reports in BW
> needs any ABAP at all. There is a query builder you can use to create
> the report you want (in Excel or for the Web). The use of Business
> Explorer Analyzer is just not as comfortable than using Hyperions
> Excel Add-in or other vendors'.
>
> > > RDBMS and the way SAP BW implementes aggregates is not like Oracle's
>
> Read the rest of this message... (62 more lines)
>
> Message 6 in thread
> From: Andreas Wessner (canttell_at_yahoo.de)
> Subject: Re: SAP BW compared to Essbase/SQLServer/Oracle as a
> Enterprise Data Warehouse & OLAP application
>
>
> View this article only
> Newsgroups: comp.databases.olap, comp.databases.oracle.marketplace,
> comp.databases.oracle.server, microsoft.public.sqlserver.datawarehouse
> Date: 2003-01-16 13:59:17 PST
>
>
>
> Amanda, Tim,
>
> > You can buy and use Cognos "headstarts" for SAP BW which will give users
all
> > the benefits of the Cognos client against SAP's Data Warehouse. However,
I
> > believe that the user can not perform OLAP disconnected.
>
> Headstart can be used to connect Impromptu against the physical tables
> of
> SAP BW. This means just database security, no application security.
> Powerplay facilitates the OLE DB for OLAP (ODBO) interface SAP
> implements.
> Unfortunately in the past (BW 2.1 to 3.0A) SAP's ODBO interface
> experienced
> slight "improvements" by SAP resulting in 3rd party software (also
> Powerplay) not working with SAP BW any more. I wouldn't therefore
> recommend
> patching BW (and you have to apply many patches) without the 3rd party
> vendors' assurance that his software runs with the new SAP BW patch.
>
> You wonder why SAP customers are loyal? I assume that they think
> stucking
> with the "market leader" is a good thing - SAP products are self
> running
> although they are far from optimality. Secondly have you ever tried to
> image
> what you would tell your boss if you voted for a software costing your
> company a fortune and realizing half a year later that you made a
> mistake?
>
> Regards,
>
> A.
> Message 7 in thread
> From: Nigel Pendse (nigelp_at_nospam.compuserve.com)
> Subject: Re: SAP BW compared to Essbase/SQLServer/Oracle as a
> Enterprise Data Warehouse & OLAP application
>
>
> View this article only
> Newsgroups: comp.databases.olap, comp.databases.oracle.marketplace,
> comp.databases.oracle.server, microsoft.public.sqlserver.datawarehouse
> Date: 2003-01-16 14:31:54 PST
>
>
> "Andreas Wessner" <canttell_at_yahoo.de> wrote in message
> news:b079vj$mgcun$2_at_ID-25239.news.dfncis.de...
> > You wonder why SAP customers are loyal? I assume that they think
stucking
> > with the "market leader" is a good thing - SAP products are self
running
> > although they are far from optimality. Secondly have you ever tried to
image
> > what you would tell your boss if you voted for a software costing your
> > company a fortune and realizing half a year later that you made a
mistake?
>
> Indeed so, but many sites assume that SAP BW must, by definition, be
> better
> integrated with R/3 than third party products are, which is not
> necessarily
> true. There's also a very long history of ERP vendors (or ledger
> vendors, as
> they used to be called) doing a poor job with end-user business
> applications. Companies like Hyperion, Cognos, Business Objects,
> Comshare,
> etc have long derived a significant part of their business from
> providing
> the flexible analysis and reporting that was promised but not
> delivered by
> the supplier of the ledgers. Oracle tried to overcome this by buying
> the
> Express business from IRI, and marketing OFA as the standard front-end
> for
> Oracle Financials, but this product has been fading.
>
> But, as you say, once a company has spent tens of millions to
> implement SAP,
> it's very hard for them to accept that they then need to buy a third
> party
> product from a smaller vendor to make the most of it.
>
> Nigel Pendse
> OLAP Solutions
> http://www.olapreport.com
Received on Thu Feb 19 2004 - 19:21:53 CST
