Introduction

In the fiercely increasing competition amongst corporations it has become mandatory to make quick and sound crucial business decisions based on analysis of business critical data. This is the point where data warehouses come into play. Although many companies are relying on data warehouses, they are still struggling to achieve positive results due to fragmented and inconsistent data. For them SAP’s Business Information Warehouse (BW) provides a complete information factory solution. BW is the central component in the SAP suite of applications with an added advantage of being a software package that can be used in both SAP and non-SAP environments.

For the modern enterprise, time wasted due to data loss and inconsistencies is unacceptable, particularly when this can often be remedied easily through the use of a data warehouse. SAP introduced Business Warehouse Information Systems (BW) in the first half of 1997. This system approach consolidates the external and the internal sources of data into a single repository and provides preconfigured data that aids the organizations and enterprises in dealing with the data management and archiving. The SAP environment therefore expanded its horizon with the introduction and implementation of SAP BW to encompass new applications for the SAP R/3 administrators responsible for administering and maintenance of these data reserves.

In this 10 article tutorial we will cover subjects such as:

* Overview
* Info Cubes
* Architecture
* Metadata Modelling
* ETL Fundamentals
* ETL Components
* Storage Service Layers
* Integration
* Conclusion