Thursday, May 28, 2009

Most famous BW backend SAP developer

During my all long SAP tenure I got used that if I really need to understand how and why system is behaving like it does I need to start up debugger and debug it. Since very first time I started with BW I noticed ABAP code commented out by one particular SAP employee called Matthias Lux. There are some many places within code where his simple statements like:

*break luxm. "#EC NOBREAK

If you ever debugged any SAP BW code you anticipated it.












He contributes into a lot of SAP Notes related to BW, like following one: 978194 - 70SP10: RSAOLTP 380 when activating DataStore object 
 
I have no clue how much people from SAP AG is working on new releases, support packages, etc. of SAP BW but they might be around hundred people. So I consider Mr. Lux is greater contributor to SAP BW backend development, his contribution can be comparable to involvement of Dr. ABAP to overall SAP technology. Good job Mr. Lux; keep going.

The highest data load "Request ID" no. you ever seen in SAP BW system?

Recently I noticed in system of my current costumer quite high no. of data load request ID. I was wondering if this is the highest no that I ever seen. Actually I wasn’t very interesting in that so far; so it might be that I’ve seen higher no in other system before.













Request ID is being generated in system by number range (TA SNRO, table for range is NRIV) called RS_OBJNUMG within a range from 0000001 to 9999000. This means 9,9 millions data requests you can have. A database table where Request IDs are stored is RSICCONT in columns RNSIDLAST. It is very important to have consistent Request IDs while you coping SAP BW systems or migrating. Also notice that you must not to transport number ranges values from one system to another; that might cause serious problems.

P.S. What’s your highest no of "Request ID"? :o)

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Switching off SAP BW reports from production

First note that technique described in this post is not advisable to follow. Take it as a pure cheating of system and be aware that this activity might cause inconsistencies within your BW queries. Anyway sometimes it is necessary to do not allow users to access reports. Of course normal way would be that you lock users in SAP system in order to prevent them to log to system. This can be done via basis transaction. In case you running BW as global system with some other SAP solution running in same system even in different clients (like ECC+BW+SCM+PLM… etc) you cannot effort to do this. Therefore I tried to play with BW stuff in order to switch off reports from production.
There are 2 changes that you need to make:

Table RSZCOMPDIR contains directory of all report’s components and it has field OBJSTAT (referring to domain RSOBJSTAT) describing status of query or component of query. It can have following values:

ACT    Active, executable
INA    Inactive, not executable
OFF    Switched off
PRO    Productive

Once you change value of this field from ACT to INA value you achieve that report will NOT be run able anymore.

Table RSRREPDIR contains directory of reports and it has field same OBJSTAT (referring to same domain) describing status of query or component of query.

Once you change value of these 2 fields from ACT to INA value for Active version of objects (OBJVERS = ‘A’) you achieve that report will NOT be run able anymore. E.g. BEx Analyzer shows your report while you try to search it but if you attempt to run it you receive message:

Query cannot be generated here. Correct it in Query Designer. R9E 977
Query definition D5OLML1YXH9DEMU34HWGJ0XX0 could not be read. BRAIN  252D..
Query ZMM_Q03_3X_VERSION could not be opened. BRAIN 635
>> Row: 37 Inc: CONSTRUCTOR Prog:CL_RSR_OLAP_VAR RS_EXCEPTION 301CL_RSR_OLAP_VAR






You can write some small and handy ABAP routine to do this in batch mode for a range of reports.

Thursday, May 14, 2009

SAP + BO joined portfolio


As it is been quite time since SAP’s acquisition of BO a set of BI products is quite range. According BI platform roadmap some of products will be divested out by some new ones that will replace them, some are redundant, etc. but still there is a large set of tools and it is quite confusing. Below I’m providing a matrix of almost all products available. Notice that list is not inclusive since it is almost not possible to capture all SAP + BO product in comprehensive manner.


Origin

Area

Product
family

Tools

BO

(Advanced)
Analytics

SAP
BusinessObjects XI

Voyager,
Predictive
Workbench,
Set
Analysis

BO

Dashboards
and visualization


Xcelsius
Suite,
Dashboard
Builder,
VizServer

BO

Information
infrastructure

SAP
BusinessObjects Enterprise


BO

Query,
reporting and analyses

SAP
BusinessObjects Desktop Intelligence,
SAP
BusinessObjects Web Intelligence


BO

Reporting

Crystal Reports

Crystal
Reports Developer Advantage
,
Crystal
Reports Server
,
Crystal
Reports Viewer
,
crystalreports.com

SAP


SAP BEx
Suite


BO

Search and
navigation

SAP
BusinessObjects Explorer,
SAP
BusinessObjects Intelligent Search


BO

Data
integration

SAP
BusinessObjects Data Integrator,
SAP
BusinessObjects Data Federator,
SAP
BusinessObjects Rapid Marts packages,
SAP
BusinessObjects Text Analysis


BO

Data
quality management


SAP
BusinessObjects Data Quality Management software,
SAP
BusinessObjects Universal Data Cleanse software,
SAP
BusinessObjects Data Quality Management for SAP solutions,
SAP BusinessObjects
Data Quality Management for Oracle's Siebel CRM,
SAP
BusinessObjects Data Insight software,
SAP
BusinessObjects Postalsoft software solutions,
SAP
BusinessObjects Watchlist Security software

BO

Data
services


SAP
BusinessObjects Data Services

SAP

Master
data management


SAP
NetWeaver MDM

BO

Metadata
management


SAP
BusinessObjects Metadata Management

BO

Planning
and
Consolidation

SAP
BusinessObjects Edge Planning and Consolidation

SAP
BusinessObjects Cartesis Finance

BO

Strategy
Management

SAP
Businessobjects Edge Strategy Management



Key products/technologies:
SAP BEx Suite - provides reporting/analysis/planning tools for analyses and decision-making support of business.
SAP BusinessObjects Explorer (former name: Polestar) - tool primary for business users with a simple, quick search based access to data.
BO Crystal Reports (CR) - industry standard tool for enterprise reporting.
BO Web Intelligence (WebI) - tool for web-based ad-hoc query and reporting. Focus on creation of light-weight reports in ad-hoc web reporting.
BO Dashboard Builder - is content layout tool (page building) for creating composite dashboards.
BO Crystal Xcelsius - visual content creation tool for creation single/standalone dashboards for the desktop or portal page.
BO InfoView - end-user BI portal interface, a single web interface that accesses and interacts with BI information (reports, analytics, dashboards, scorecards, maps...).
BO Voyager - OLAP tool designed for financial/business analyses on a full range of functions to analyze multi-dimensional data.
BO Mobile XI - creating BI app. for mobile devices.
BO LiveOffice - deployment and access of BI reports & dashboards from Microsoft Office applications.
SAP NW CE (NetWeaver Composition Environment) - platform for building composite applications (app that creates new functionality by leveraging existing services of another app, so called mash-up) based on SOA principles.
SAP/BO BI widgets - are a mini-application that allows access to frequently used functions and provides visual information right from the desktop. Can be developed in e.g. SAP Visual Composer, BO on AIR, etc.
BO Predictive Workbench - predictive analytic tool. Reveals trends and patterns to understand business changes.
BO Set Analysis - define, track, and analyze segments that drive business activities.
Future tools:
BO Pioneer - future tool will combine Voyager's user interface with OLAP capabilities of today's BEx OLAP tools.
BO Explorer - brings together search and navigation capabilities from BO with the SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse Accelerator to dig into large data sets in a matter of seconds. Tool was announced on May 2009 during Sapphire 2009 in Orlando. The product will be available this summer.
You can find free SAP BO products directory here.

Monday, May 11, 2009

Creating reports based on SAP BW InfoProviders in BO Crystal Reports


As probably many of you I have approached BO tools in order to obtain basic feeling about it since especially reporting tools are going to replace our famous BEx tool as depicted in BI roadmap published by SAP. In this post I’m focused on pure reporting part of BO which is represented by tool called Crystal Reports (CR) 2008. Crystal Reports is software originally created about year 1990 by company called Crystal Services which was bought by Seagate Technology in 1994. Seagate renamed its software unit at that time as Crystal Decisions which was attained by Business Objects (BO) in 2003; finally BO was taken over by SAP in 2008. Since that time BO stood as an industry standard in category of reporting software as it is bundled with several major development tools.
Let’s start with software that I used. A reporting tool as it self I downloaded as a copy of 30 day evaluation version from official SAP.com pages. Then I needed a tool called BusinessObjects Integration Kit for SAP - Crystal Reports 2008 which is downloadable from SDN.
Crystal reports are to be created out of Crystal Reports 2008 but you need to have an info provider out of BW that is supplying data for “Crystal Reports” based report.  In my case I used normal BW query created in BW by BEx. BW query is created prior to use to create report in Crystal Reports. You have to enable your query to allow external access to query. You set this as a check box on query properties in BEx Query Designer.
 
1. Open CR 2008, there is a Crystal Reports toolbar specific to BW. 
  
2. Create a blank report via menu File-> New-> Blank Report -> BW system connected to CR is displayed and all queries from BW system are listed, pick up your BW query which will be served as base query fro your CR query:

 
3. Follow wizard in order to select fields that you want to display in CR query and other settings for CR query.
4. Adjust layout and other settings of your CR query in CR 2008. Data is automatically refreshed with data taken from BW server any time you open CR2008 tool.
Query output in BEx Analyzer:


  

Query output in CR2008: