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#1 (**permalink**) 02-27-2008, 05:03 PM

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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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?N...D=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

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

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