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SAP BW compared to Essbase/SQLServer/Oracle as a Enterprise Data Warehouse & OLAP application

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Amanda Jones

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Jan 11, 2003, 4:37:28 AM1/11/03

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 Basis
skills
6) UNIX system Admin resources

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.

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

Noons

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Jan 11, 2003, 5:09:12 AM1/11/03

amanda...@lycos.com (Amanda Jones) wrote in
news:d42580f.03011...@posting.google.com and I quote:

> My company as asked me to prepare and evaluate between alternative

Your company *HAS* asked you. *HAS*. Not *as*!!!!

> 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.

That goes for just about ALL software sold by SAP.
Without exception.

The last item is probably the most important. Not
only do they charge you an arm and a leg, but they
lock you in to a way of doing things that requires
either very expensive specialized consultants or
complete business re-engineering.

One of the highest costs associated with SAP as well
is: if you go down the road of customization, EVERY
SINGLE TIME you upgrade their software version you'll
be up for an enormously costly re-development/re-testing
of ALL your custom design/code.

Or else you can do what most do: re-engineer the business
to fit the SAP "model". Then you're even more locked-in,
but that doesn't seem to worry the idiots buying this sort
of thing: after all, when the proverbial hits the fan they'll
be long gone and not held responsible for this madness.

> 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

Says lots for the TCO of their solutions, eh?

>
> 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 Basis
> skills
> 6) UNIX system Admin resources

and then you need to hire the third party consultants to come
and do the business process re-engineering for you. That usually
involves lots of "visioning".
Mostly visioning the size of your budget...

> data. The consulting project was in itself appears to be a million
> dollar project and more.

Yup. Very much in character.

> 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.

Yup. Again, in character. Of course, if all that
causes horrendous performance problems, the fault is
ALWAYS with some other supplier. NEVER, never with SAP.

> 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.

And you'd be surprised what Basis and ABAP are really based on
and how they operate internally. I'll give you a hint: about
40 years old technology, all Cobol-based, all flat-file based.

> 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 ??

Lovely, isn't it?

>
> 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.
>

You got that right.

> Oracle/SQL Server with Hyperion Essbase/Cognos. Some of the SAP BW
> consultants claim SAP BW is better than Business Objects, Cognos or
> Hyperion.

What do you expect a mafia like that to say?

> 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.

You just did the best comparison I've seen in a long time.
I couldn't have put it better myself. IMO, SAP is one of
the biggest ripoffs this industry has ever seen.

--
Cheers
Nuno Souto
nso...@optusnet.com.au.nospam

Nigel Pendse

unread,

Jan 11, 2003, 5:17:57 AM1/11/03

"Amanda Jones" <amanda...@lycos.com> wrote in message
news:d42580f.03011...@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/

DA Morgan

unread,

Jan 11, 2003, 2:04:02 PM1/11/03

Have yet to meet anyone that has been happy with SAP as compared to the products of other vendors. There has been a good discussion of Essbase / Cognos / MS in the SQL Server usenet group recently: Probably still ongoing so search the google archives.

Personally I prefer the Oracle 9i solution due to performance, availability of third party products, and scalability. Any solution that is dependent upon the Windows 32bit O/S will never give the performance, scalability, and stability available using 64bit UNIX. And by the time MS gets a 64 bit O/S no doubt Sun and HP will be offering 128bit architecture.

Also, in the future, please do not post technical messages to comp.databases.oracle.marketplace. That usenet group is for marketers not technical discussions.

Daniel Morgan

timgale

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Jan 14, 2003, 5:59:00 PM1/14/03

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" <amanda...@lycos.com> wrote in message
news:d42580f.03011...@posting.google.com...

Ihre_Frage

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Jan 16, 2003, 12:25:17 PM1/16/03

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
> > 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.

This is not a hundred per cent correct. SAP can use materialized
views. And aggregates always look like small stars in relational data
bases.

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.

You are right: SAP BW needs significant more joins to query an
InfoCube than other tools. This results from its complex structure
(texts, hierarchies, attributes, etc.) and slows down performance even
if they use Oracle's star join.

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 ??

This is true, ridiculous and shows how nervous the SAP people must be
that someone uses a "fast" and "easy-to-use" multidimensional database
for DSS or even just use BW as an extraction tool to get data out of
R/3.

> >
> > 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.

There is exactly one situation where SAP's frontend Business Explorer
is "better" than most other tools: When using BW as a data source and
employing Business Explorer Web Application Builder for a Web based
information system.

If you look at relational databases I would recommend to have a look
onto 9i. I am not related to Oracle but their concept of integrating
multidimensional OLAP into the RDBMS is far beyond IBM's who are just
beginning to implement some OLAP functionality into DB2. Regarding
your data volume NCR teradata or Microsoft SQL Server could be an
option, too. And not to forget there are Sybase, Sand Technology and
others too, not talking about the multidimensional data bases like
Applix iTM1, MS Analysis Services, Essbase, ...

You were asking if SAP BW is a EDW. This is hard to answer and depend
mainly on the amount of data sources you want to use for building it.
SAP BW is a more convenient way to report data stored in R/3. It
provides all the attributes and things you know from R/3 from
Variables to texts, to (time dependent) hierarchies, to user settings,
etc. In any case it will need significant more resources to implement
and run a BW than to implement your solution on a neutral platform. In
the latter case the only problem you have is to get the data out of
R/3.

Kind regards,

Andreas Wessner

unread,

Jan 16, 2003, 4:59:00 PM1/16/03

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,

Nigel Pendse

unread,

Jan 16, 2003, 5:31:39 PM1/16/03

"Andreas Wessner" <cant...@yahoo.de> wrote in message
news:b079vj$mgcun$2...@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.

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