SAP Business Information Warehouse (SAP BW) is a data warehousing system with an optimized data structures that mainly used for reporting and analytical purposes, SAP BW enables you to analyze data directly from SAP applications and also other business applications and external data sources.

SAP BW is using OLAP engine and tools that uses historical data set in a range of 2-7 years, the OLAP engine also will provide a multi-dimensional analysis. It also provides the OLAP Toots with data via BAPI, CML and OLE DB for OLAP interfaces.

The OLAP area is divided into 3 main components called the business explorer (BEx) that you can use to create a flexible reporting and a powerful analytical tool.

1. BEx Analyzer (Based on MS EXcel) -> Can also be used to display query.
2. BEx Web application
3. BEx Mobile Intelligence.

The main data basis of SAP BW is divided into self-contained business datatargets (InfoProviders). By defining queries for data targets in the BEx query designer, you can analyze the the basis data of SAP BW.

The best thing about this BEx analyzer and BEx web application (no 1,2) is that they are 2 integrated application that will enable us to display query from BEx Analyzer in standard view and change it into a web browser display with just a mouse click.

The SAP BW can read many different file types such as:

1. Flat Files: A file with type of ASCII or CSV can also be bread using SAP BW Standard.

2. Data providers: Providers such as DUN & BradStreet and AC Nielsen US has an import friendly formatted data.

3. XML: You can also use XML data type in SAP BW.

Ways to connect SAP BW into data sources:

1. DB Connet.

This connection type will allow SAP BW to connect relational datases directly by using SAP DB Multiconnect that can create a connection to the database management system.

2. ETL Tools.

When dealing with a different types of data sources, it’s very important to consolidate the data structures first before uploading it into SAP BW, and ETL tools such as Siebel can transform this data into a readable single format to be uploaded into SAP BW using business programming interface.

3. UD Connect

Using UD connect you can access all kind of relational and multi dimensional data sources, it will transfer the data as flat data.

4. BAPI.

BAPI is used for the structured communication between SAP BW and many external systems that is also used by ETL tool.

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