Sunday, February 24, 2013

SAP Business Warehouse 7.4

After almost 2 years and few months passed after BW 7.3 was released new version 7.4 is coming. Finally SAP people had some time to spend also on some other of their offerings except HANA :-) Unfortunately so far 7.4 is not providing any new functionality outside of regards to HANA. According BW roadmap available here focus also in future will be on HANA scenarios e.g. with connection to Business Suite on HANA. 

Following official information resources are available on BW 7.4:

Positioning of SAP NW BW powered by SAP HANA and SAP HANA Analytics Foundation


-      09/05/2013 Update –

There is a one limitation being in all BW’s version for long time. It is with regards to maximum length of characteristic value. It has a limit of 60 characters. Well it had the limit. As of BW release 7.4 SPS2 this limit is over. Up to 250 characters are now possible. Technically this is implemented by extending domain RSCHAVL which was changed from data type CHAR 60 to SSTRING (255 characters in length). Similarly text for characteristic can have in BW 7.4 up to 1333 characters. This is done by replacing structure RSTXTSML with RSTXTSMXL.

This is for first sight positive news however it has some negative glance. Such a long data type is threated by ABAP as so called "deep" type. Some of ABAP language statements cannot deal with such a long types. Therefore it might happen that some of custom code will defunct ending with runtime error.

You can use ABAP Test Cockpit (Transaction ATC). ATC is successor of CheckMan tool.
This info is taken from SAP Note 1823174 - BW7.40 Changes and customer-specific programs.


-      23/10/2013 Update –
SAP published a roadmap for NetWeaver BW 7.4 on SAP HANA. You can find it here. It covers Upcoming planned release / Future innovations of BW 7.4

BW 7.4 is replaced by SAP Business Warehouse 7.5 

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