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Home -> Community -> Usenet -> c.d.o.server -> SAP BW compared to Essbase/SQLServer/Oracle as a Enterprise Data Warehouse & OLAP application
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 :
1) ABAP resources to program ETL process 2) SAP BW resources to configure SAP BW (develop cubes) and reports 3) Ascential resources to develop non-SAP ETL processes 4) Crystal resources to develop Crystal reports 5) SAP BW technical resource with skills in Oracle DBA and SAP Basisskills
And software licensing & hardware resources for implementing SAP BW
was around the following numbers:
1) SAP BW licensing around approx USD3000-3500 per user per year -
since BW as a user
based licensing
2) CPU based licensing for Crystal reports 3) CPU based licensing for Ascential ETL 4) UNIX hardware servers
Considering the above was only the tip of the costing most user sites had used a big 5 consulting company involving a 8 month to 1 year project to implement a small data mart to extract and report on SAP data. The consulting project was in itself appears to be a million dollar project and more.
Secondly most of the sites indicated that SAP BW does not support bulk loading like using SQL Loader to do large data bulk loads and ETL process could not use Oracle PL/SQL or whatever and had to be done in ABAP. The cubes in BW itself where nothing but star schema tables on a RDBMS and the way SAP BW implementes aggregates is not like Oracle's materialized views but copies the same data in the base cubes into a number of additional star schemas so if a cube as 50 aggreagates these 50 aggregates are like 50 small star schema cubes with the data in the base cube copied to these aggregate tables as well with each build of the BW cubes.Apart from this these aggregates have indexes as well. We looked at some of the SQL generated by SAP BW reporting solution which is nothing but a Visual Basic for Application (VBA) addin to Microsoft Excel the SQL queries for even simple tasks where long SQL selects with so many joins.
SAP BW supports only ROLAP and the ROLAP engine is the same SAP Basis application server SAP always had on R/3 and the ROLAP is implemented in SQL and ABAP programs.
We also need data from SAP for other systems and we examined the open hub and spoke data warehousing feature that BW 30B claims to support and we found it could not populate/load data into another database directly and needed data to be extracted off SAP BW to a flat file to be loaded manually to another system. Apart, from this we were told that despite the claim of SAP BW of hub and spoke data warehouse if we need to take data in SAP BW to another data mart or data warehouse we need to pay license to SAP for extracting our own data in SAP BW ?? which I feel is a major issue I have never heard of any data warehousing or ETL vendor measuring the data extracted from a source system and asking license to be based on data extracted.
Further, our checks with customers who are using 3rd party reporting tools like Cognos, Business Objects and Dynasight as not been impressive at all most customers indicated lot of technical issues and not all of SAP BW could be accessed by these 3rd party reporting tools and using 3rd party reporting tools was slow against SAP BW.
I did a bit of research and found some technical architecture review of SAP BW on the internet done by Bill Inmon one at :
http://www.dmreview.com/master.cfm?NavID=198&EdID=2562
and the other also by Bill Inmon titled SAP and Data Warehousing at the Hyperion site:
http://www.hyperion.com/products/whitepapers/
In both of the above whitepapers Bill Inmon as strongly criticised SAP BW architecture and as indicated SAP BW is not a data warehouse at all.
A few other whitepapers I found at :
Titled: Assessing Data Warehouse Solutions that Support SAP R/3 from Hurwitz at
http://www.dmreview.com/master.cfm?NavID=198&EdID=2307
Hurwitz Group recently conducted research to determine which software vendors score well when measured by these two requirements. A summary of research findings can be seen online at: www.hurwitz.com/news/compl andscape.html
THE HURWITZ TAKE: The long list of software vendors now offering packaged solutions attests to the need among SAP R/3 users for packaged warehouse solutions. The list also corroborates Hurwitz Group's assertion that SAP AG's business information warehouse is too narrowly defined to serve as an enterprise-scope data warehouse.
One more from report from Gartner which specifically talks of packaged BI applications titled:
BI Application Spaghetti-Tasty meal or sauce on shirt
The feedback from customers using SAP BW and some independent analysts like the ones above does not give us a comfort level to me to recommend whether SAP BW will be a ideal data warehouse for our company. The least I want is to lead the company into something of a quicksand.
The only major alternative I found for SAP BW was Acta ETL & analytics and appears several customers use Acta to get data from SAP and load a RDBMS(Oracle or SQL Server) and Acta provides predefined Star schemas to report on customers seem to be using Essbase, Cognos and Business Objects on top of Acta.
I found several case studies on successul Acta usage and Acta product reviews done by DM review at:
http://www.dmreview.com/master.cfm?NavID=198&EdID=1576 http://www.dmreview.com/master.cfm?NavID=198&EdID=244 http://www.dmreview.com/master.cfm?NavID=198&EdID=481 http://www.dmreview.com/master.cfm?NavID=198&EdID=167 http://www.dmreview.com/master.cfm?NavID=198&EdID=1090http://www.dmreview.com/master.cfm?NavID=198&EdID=116 http://www.dmreview.com/master.cfm?NavID=198&EdID=47 http://www.dmreview.com/master.cfm?NavID=198&EdID=3609
the only other solution I can think of is using Informatica for SAP ETL and Informatica analytics.
The reason I am posting this message is could you kindly provide me the pros and cons of using SAP BW or not and what as been your experience with Acta which is now part of Business Objects and Informatica which are the only alternatives.
Precisely can you please provide pointers on what features we need to consider for evaluating a enterprise data warehouse or a data warehouse and is SAP BW a enterprise data warehouse if not why. Which are the best solutions for a EDW in the marketplace now.
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.
Thanks
Amanda
Received on Sat Jan 11 2003 - 03:37:28 CST
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