SAP BW compared to Essbase/SQLServer/Oracle as a Enterprise Data
Belinda
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 (amanda...@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 (nig...@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" <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/
Message 3 in thread
From: DA Morgan (damo...@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 (tim...@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" <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
Read the rest of this message... (194 more lines)
Message 5 in thread
From: Ihre_Frage (Ihre_...@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 (cant...@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 (nig...@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" <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.
Nigel Pendse
OLAP Solutions
http://www.olapreport.com
Ray Higdon
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" <belin...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:41af5e48.04021...@posting.google.com...
Mario
Could you please email me the links to the two articles you mentioned?
The ones from Pendse and the SAP Benchmark with MS Analysis Services.
I tried sending you an email but the address you typed bounced back.
Regards,
Mario
Belinda
I will email the Powerpoint comparative benchmark presentation from
SAP. If you need more info on this there is a Program Manager contact
at Microsoft you can contact him as well. But it is definitely not
rocket science that you need a benchmark to prove it if you are
already running BW it is quite easy to do. We took couple of BW cubes
pulled data of them into MS OLAP cubes a cube in BW which was around
4.5 GB ROLAP cube on Oracle 816 database was around 100 MB in MS OLAP
results might differ from cube to cube. But this is not an aspersion
against Oracle which is a great database but it is how BW creates a
complex redundancy through over engineering. I really suggest apart
from the benchmark you migrate a couple of cubes from BW to MS OLAP
and measure the size difference in the cubes storage space, time to
build the cubes, the reporting frontends available to MS OLAP vs SAP
BW and last but not the least the labor to build and manage these, the
query response times and the hardware infrastructure needed to run
this - you will be amazed at the outcome.
The above SAP Presentation compares SQL server running on a 8 way
Compaq proliant to a DB2 running on a 24 way UNIX server and SQL out
performs the DB2 as per SAP benchmark and the cubes size is 10 times
smaller than the DB2 ROLAP cubes.
For the BW writeup from Nigel Pendse I think it is a subscription
article you need to contact OLAP report or Nigel Pendse personally
about it to get a copy of it.
Once you have gone through this experience you will realise how many
SAP BW customers have been taken for a ride paying millions of dollars
on licensing, labor and hardware infrastructure to run the SAP BW
beast.
Thanks
Belinda
"valli...@yahoo.com" <anon...@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message news:<1434201c3f7fd$2015ec00$a601...@phx.gbl>...
> Hello Belinda, You are absolutely correct!
> We had high productivity on Olap. SAP BW white elephant
> was let in, after resisting for several years. Now it
> drains dollars and hours beyond estimates and leave
> frustrated analysts.
>
> Can you please email me the link!!
>
> Thanks,
> Valli
> >.
> >
Nigel Pendse
>
> 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
SAP BW did even worse in The OLAP Survey 3 (http://www.survey.com/olap) than
in the previous edition, and much worse than any other product. The
strictly-independent OLAP Survey 3 recently surveyed 1047 OLAP-using sites
from around the world, so the results have more statistical validity than
most surveys.
Compared to nine other BI products with significant representation in the
survey sample:
- BW customers were less likely to report that they had derived business
benefits (cutting costs, improving reporting, enhancing customer
satisfaction, better decision-making, etc) from the project than users of
any other product.
- BW users were less likely to achieve their original goals than users of
any other product. Uniquely, SAP BW sites were more likely to have achieved
no goals at all than to have fully achieved their original goals.
- BW customers were less likely to have carried out a competitive product
evaluation before purchasing than any others.
- BW sites had incurred the second-highest license fees; the product with
slightly higher license fees had much larger numbers of deployed seats.
- BW sites incurred by far the highest ratio of consulting to license fees.
- BW projects took longer to go live than any others.
- BW sites had the highest shelfware rate (that is, seats purchased but not
deployed).
- BW sites have the second-highest rate of reporting technical problems
(almost twice as bad as Microsoft Analysis Services sites, who had the
lowest problem rate).
- BW sites were the least likely to report that they saw no deterrents to
wider deployment.
- BW sites were the second-most likely to complain of poor query performance
(two to three times higher than Oracle Express, Microsoft AS and Essbase sit
es). Actual query times were about four times longer than these products,
despite having comparable data volumes.
Dave
Hello -
Figured I throw in my 2 cents. I started my career doing SAP
implementations, then moved into OLAP (Oracle Express) and data
warehousing, then SAP BW, then Oracle Relational, and my current
contract is on SAP BW. So I've had some varied experience...
First let me say this....I wanted to try working with SAP BW 3.0
because it looked like there were a lot of improvements. But now
having worked with it, I still don't like it compared to Oracle (for
instance.)
SAP BW was built on top of the existing R/3 basis layer. Probably a
smart move for SAP at the time. They could leverage their existing
infrastructure that abstracted the app server from the db, many
existing basis management features, the ABAP language was there for
development/customization, a horizontal scaling strategy via multiple
app servers, intra-instance communication protocols were there, etc. I
good idea in concept, maybe a great business decision...when
performance is bad, you need to buy more app servers. But a bad idea
technically, the SAP infrastructure was built for OLTP not OLAP.
I don't know the details of how BW is working under the covers, but
I'm sure a lot of it is procedural ABAP code being generated based on
user point and clicks. When you are working with bulk data, and trying
to do ad-hoc reporting, procedural code abstracted from the db server
isn't the best thru-put for these types of queries.
Some of the nice things BW gives you are the scheduling and monitoring
features, the correction and transport system, the built-in extraction
from R/3, and the business content, (but I haven't used the business
content that much to tell you the truth), speed of development if you
are doing something that FITS WITHIN THE FRAMEWORK (cubes) and is
fairly standard, currency and language translation features built in,
and new delta tracking features.
But this doesn't compare to the frustrating issues...
1.) ODS layer is not a true/flexible DW layer. It is simple relational
tables with primary keys with options for secondary indexes. There
doesn't seem to be an easy way to create a more normalized data
warehouse layer with more complex constraints and relationships
between entities.
2.) Ever try adding a column to a table? I think you have to dump the
data and reload. So you'll need to write an ABAP program to reload
probably or create a new one time load into the new structure from the
old one.
3.) What if you need to investigate data issues? Ever try ad-hoc
analysis? I haven't found an easy method for joining 2 tables in SAP
with my own custom query. I use SE16 to look at individual tables and
then dump them and load into MS-Access if I need to do real data
quality investigation.
4.) All aggregates for a cube are stored in one physical table. Kind
of a weird architecture.
5.) Bex is a cumbersome reporting tool.
6.) Very proprietary. In Oracle, if I create a data warehouse, I could
create my own front-end using just JDBC access into the database if I
wanted to. No way could I do that with BW.
There are probably more....but I need to get back to work. :)
Dave
Belinda
What you have mentioned is the tip of the iceberg. We were a fairly
large BW site (with 40 users) the amount of resources we had to throw
at this BW server for 35 users was a 15 CPU RISC UNIX machine with
about 14 GB RAM. Imagine this processing grunt and the system would
still suffer. SAP did considerable tuning but to no avail. Our peers
in town are running their entire enterprise datawarehouse on Oracle
with Business Objects as the reporting tool for about 4000 users on
the similar hardware - guess how interesting it is. Our peer
enterprise data warehouse on a Oracle 817 database handles 80 million
records+ uploads overnight with ease with same hardware the BW system
will be lucky to process even one tenth of that volume overnight.
I will give you another interesting scenario we had cube in SAP BW
which is a standard business content cube with about 12
dimensions(characteristics) and 15 measures (key figures) and we had
partitioned this cube in BW the size of this cube for a measly 1.5
million records was about 9.5 GB and when we looked at the Oracle
database for the schema for this table there were 6900 objects of this
cube about 5500 tables that BW had created for this cube. When we
dumped this cube into a flat file it was about 530 MB imagine the
storage efficiency !!!!! of BW. Guess the huge dead workload SAP BW is
creating to Oracle to update the CBO optimiser statistics for this
cube and apart each day when we load the cube even though the load is
a delta load it drops all indexes and rebuilds the indexes against the
cube creating a shocking amount of database fragmentation and as well
many times many indexes are degenerate. No wonder our Oracle DBAs were
always up in the arm complaining the BW developers had built a very
bad design. The BW developer as no control on all these large number
of tables created a simple Bex Query generates an average 5 to 10 page
A4 size SQL outputs the DBAs are bewildered at the query once again
the BW developer as no control over the SQL generated. No wonder the
performance is so shocking and sites have to keep throwing tonnes of
hardware grunt at BW. For a 1.5 million records I can put that kind of
data and query it more efficiently in a MS Access database.
I hope Bill Inmon should go to BW user sites and look at this
appalling joke before he comments. What is incredible is for SAP the
next best thing to sliced bread is SAP BW that is how it is being
positioned and little do people realise if the design and architecture
of the system is bad nothing can fix it. SAP has written the data
mining engine which is nothing but ABAP reports for data mining
algorithms. What really surprises me is the entire data warehousing
industry is blind and a silent spectator to this appalling ride the
industry is being taken. If SAP just resells a Oracle or SQL database
it would do more justice to customers than its over engineered product
in BW. Oracle 9i as such powerful features like external tables,
powerful SQL, PL/SQL, Java, materialised views in the database none of
this can be used by BW customers they are stuck with ABAP - which is
convoluted Cobol not a language for ETL. BW uses a powerful database
like Oracle as a dump file store the application does not even use
stored procedures most SQL is generated dynamically so BW customers
can even use a mySQL database and would not get anything better in
other industry leading database at the way BW or R/3 uses the
underlying database. Last but not the least all the tables in BW are
names like
/BIC/PZVAB0101 - what a good naming convention. Have you ever seen a
data warehouse against which a data warehouse developer cannot use SQL
and do test query to check data - the developer cannot even issue a
SQL query how interesting is it the whole purpose of using a
relational data base itself is defeated. If you want to look at the
data in the table write a ABAP program or use a simple table browser.
Ask a BW developer whether he can issue a SQL Select with a outer join
on the tables it will be emphatic - CAN'T. This is the 21st century
data warehouse!!.
I really like the open backend and frontend architecture of PeopleSoft
datawarehouse architecture. They have made wise decision in using
robust ETL in Informatica and used open RDBMS based data warehouse and
robust OLAP and proven reporting layer.
If people are arguing about the justification of business content in
BW ask how many sites have used business content most business content
available is not very useful. Whatever is useable try extending it you
do not even know what tables and columns in R/3 the extractors are
pulling data from and what tranformation it does on those fields. Try
extending a extractor (business content) provided by SAP say the table
is extracting data from TABLEA if you want to pull two more fields in
TABLEA from the same extractor the only way you can do it is you have
to wait for SAP to finish extracting the data from TABLEA into a
internal memory array and then you use the values in the memory array
to go and relookup at TABLEA on the keys to fetch the remaining fields
- imagine this. I am yet to see this kind of weird architecture
anywhere the old network and hierarchical databases were more flexible
than this - if it all sounds too good to believe go and ask BW
customers. Just see how many customers are successfully using a 3rd
party reporting tool on top of BW - we struggled to get Business
Objects working for more than 4 months on BW and could not get it to
work. Read the literature i.e., documentation on business content that
SAP customers get from SAP which is in the following URL to see how
comprehensive and how much of sense it makes:
http://help.sap.com/saphelp_bw/helpdata/en/75/88c338267ffd06e10000000a11405a/frameset.htm
if customers ask one question to SAP support which says how or why or
what - the price they have to pay to SAP to get answers is Euro 500 an
hour. SAP as been one of the worlds best ever marketing exercise than
anything else.
If the classic paradigm says that people who built datawarehouses with
open relational databases with a open backend and open frontend and
with such powerful languages like PL/SQL & Java - 80% of them fail
imagine the number of failed so called marketing datawarehouses built
with SAP BW with its closed backend and closed frontend perhaps there
are hardly any successes. I recall the famous definition of Bill Inmon
of SAP he called SAP as the data jail, well that is really a
interesting paradigm from a man who invented data warehouses that he
also discovered to the world the data jail. It would be interesting if
Bill Inmon would like to change it now in the current changed
circumstances ??
Belinda
davi...@hotmail.com (Dave) wrote in message news:<8244b794.04022...@posting.google.com>...
Dave
I especially hate the fact that you have no method for joining tables
without writing programs....
and I too have not seen business content used effectively...
Dave
belin...@yahoo.com (Belinda) wrote in message news:<41af5e48.04022...@posting.google.com>...
Thomas Zurek
on BW are based. Oh dear ... and good luck!
"Belinda" <belin...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:41af5e48.04022...@posting.google.com...
Joerg Narr
"Thomas Zurek" <tho...@hates.spam.net> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
news:c2nbii$gn0$1...@news1.wdf.sap-ag.de...
> Thanks. That explains on what kind of know-how all your other comments
> on BW are based. Oh dear ... and good luck!
>
In my opinion you damaged SAP's and SAP BW's credibility and reputation more
than if you just kept quiet. This is a newsgroup wherein experts discuss
issues. Most of us saw vendors acting much more professional than you did. I
would suggest that you either contribute in a constructive manner or send
this thread to some professionals at SAP who are competent and constructive.
I know that there are many.
To all the other people in here: Neither all German nor all SAP consultants
act like Thomas.
Kind regards,
Joerg Narr
Belinda
criticism of SAP BW. FYI I have written even to Bill Inmon challenging
him to write a rejoinder to is earlier criticism calling SAP itself as
a data jail. Some of my views on SAP BW are as recent as BW 31x and BW
30B. Nothing much as changed it is old wine in new bottle.
I challenge anybody who would question my views to cross check with a
cross section of SAP BW customers the TCO and ROI on SAP BW many SAP
BW customers concede BW as ended up as a fancy reporting tool to R/3.
Let people come up with numbers how much have they spent in even
implementing so called business content on SAP BW. SAP BW is really
spaghetti & sauce on shirt as Gartner calls of packaged BI
applications.
My criticism of SAP is they have never come to grips that the product
is over engineered and needs a total radical redesign it is never too
late to accept a mistake and redesign the product than propagate a bad
design. Firstly, SAP as a serious issue in working with its technology
partners like Oracle or Microsoft. Since Oracle is competing now on
SAP's patch then they embraced Microsoft I know about two years ago
literally all SAP's training establishment in Walldorf was running on
SQL server and Microsoft was their best friend and once MS entered
into ERP patch now MS is another silent arch enemy after Oracle. Now
they want customers to seriously consider migrating their SAP database
platform to Sybase SQL Server. Even today it is a challenge to get SAP
running on a web interface that is why they sell all that glue called
Enterprise portals(Net Weaver) to web enable SAP. Today the whole
technology industry is polarised either in the Java world or in the
.Net world. Where is SAP still with its own proprietary ABAP world
even at the latest and greatest release of SAP R/3 - R/3 enterprise it
is all a ABAP world. ABAP is neither object oriented nor a modern
programming language it is almost Pro *COBOL in flavor. Ask SAP what
Java application server they have got - NONAME app server what is its
credential - unproven. Do they have a .Net app server none. Still in
todays world they are asking customers to build data warehouses , ETL,
OLAP and data mining solutions that in ABAP that run on ABAP. People
like Oracle have thrown all their proprietary technology baggage and
rewritten their apps in modern object oriented industry standard
languages.
If people still call this as industry technology leadership from a
major software vendor like SAP they are in a different planet
altogether, SAP is not even talking of providing its customers a full
Java or .Net platform even in the next 5 years it is still only ABAP
on the horizon. Before I conclude let me acknowledge one of SAP's
forte it is their understanding of the business processes
unquestionably this is the one and only strength remaining of SAP they
have long last the technology & agility battle in the enterprise to
their competition that is the bitter truth. They will next loose all
their customers it is too late in the day for any more innovation. SAP
technology still need monstrous hardware and expensive army of
consulting resources and a open time frame in short a project to be
started with a blank cheque to implement. Check with SAP customers who
bought the product 6 or 8 years ago have the implemented it fully it
is still work in progress ask the customers at least do they
understand what is in the product most customers do not understand so
much of the product features itself.
Belinda
"Joerg Narr" <n_o_spa_m...@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:<c2nl5q$1v51fs$1...@ID-25239.news.uni-berlin.de>...
Noons
> My criticism of SAP is they have never come to grips that the product
> is over engineered and needs a total radical redesign it is never too
> late to accept a mistake and redesign the product than propagate a bad
> design.
What, someone in the IT industry redesign a product to improve its
efficiency and performance? NEVER!!!!! Let's just squeeze as
much moolah as we can off an old concept with a new skin.
> Firstly, SAP as a serious issue in working with its technology
> partners like Oracle or Microsoft.
If that was the only serious issue...
> Now
> they want customers to seriously consider migrating their SAP database
> platform to Sybase SQL Server.
:))) How ridiculous can this really get?
> have long last the technology & agility battle in the enterprise to
Did they ever have it?
> understand what is in the product most customers do not understand so
> much of the product features itself.
'sOK, what they don't understand can't hurt them (except in the pocket)
and looks good in financial reports anyway
--
Cheers
Nuno Souto
wizo...@yahoo.com.au.nospam
William R. Epp
You are right, most SAP consultants would never be that honest.
They're all too happy to generate billable hours for something I'm not
sure will ever work.
PW
Here's an opinion from the man himself, Bill Inmon.
http://www.inmoncif.com/library/presents/erpdw/erpdw.htm