Wednesday, February 22, 2017

What is embedded BW?

There is an embedded version of BW available as of NetWeaver 7.0. This means for any SAP NetWeaver based system like ECC 6.0, CRM 7.0, SCM, Solution Manager including SAP Business Suite and S4/HANA there is a BW available inside.

Primarily the  embedded BW shall be used within scenarios that are implemented in host system (ECC, CRM etc.) like embedded reporting scenarios (by leveraging BW's Analytic Manager (OLAP engine)) or embedded planning processes (leveraging BW's planning engine) however it is still full blown BW system. As per SAP they do not advise to use it as enterprise data warehouse.
Below are restrictions that are given by SAP while using the embedded BW:

1. Amount of data - shall not exceed 20% of total data volume in the system. If this happens there is probably a negative impact on core system functions.

2. Licenses – you may require license to run embedded BW in your NetWeaver system.

3. Security - it uses different authorization concept (BW one over classic concept used in ECC)


How to enable the embedded BW? Couple of activities shall be done in order to make the embedded BW work. This includes:
Assign Logical System Client – table RSADMINA
Set BW Namespaces to Modifiable - /BI0/* and /BIC/*
Activation of technical content
Switch On Business Function



More information:
1972819 - Setup SAP BPC optimized for S/4 HANA Finance and Embedded BW Reporting (aka Integrated Business Planning for Finance)

1919631 - Activating the BPC embedded

2 comments:

Peter Baumann said...

Thank you for this information collection. Maybe you know something about the following points:
-> About 1. 20% max data volume - I'm looking here for an understandable explanation. Can you imagine why?
-> As far as I understand there will never be a complete BW/4HANA functionality available for embedded BW. Do you have more information?

Thank you!

Peter

Martin Maruskin said...

Hi Peter,

- reg 20% as max data volume: this is meant more with regards to consolidating of data from external systems. Embedded BW shall not be used for this purpose. It shall be more used towards handling data from host system. So the Embedded BW shall not be serving as enterprise DWH at all. I think technically it is possible to overcome this limit however it is an SAP customer's responsibility to do not cross this limit.

- complete functionality of BW/4HANA: I think as long as BW support pack are the same in SAP BW systems as in host system where the Embedded BW runs all functionality will be the same. However as you noticed that there is already a new code line of BW called SAP BW/4HANA - which only support SAP HANA as DB. It might be a case that going forward SAP will only be enhancing/developing this version of BW. As a host system for the Embedded BW can run also on other supported DBs then subsequently BW that will run on that DB will have no all features that the latest SAP BW/4HANA will have.

cheers