SAP BW Mentor

SAP Business Warehouse: The Big Picture now available at Pluralsight

18. October 2015 in Dashboarding, Data Mining, Data Warehousing, Mobile, Modeling, Planning, Reporting, Administrators, Analysts, BI Professionals, DW Developers, Integrated Planning Developers by sapbwmentor

SAP Business Warehouse: The Big Picture

New online SAP Business Warehouse Training for Beginners

I am proud to announce that my new online training for beginners in SAP Business Warehouse is already published at the training platform, called Pluralsight.

If you or your colleague have never worked with SAP BW before, you might be asking:

Why learning SAP Business Warehouse is important ?

My short answer is: I am convinced that Business Warehouse is the most important tool that helps you to develop yourself to become a trustful expert in your company.

Let me explain you how!

Load Google Analytics Data into SAP BW - PART V: Query and Excel

25. September 2015 in Extraction, DW Developers by sapbwmentor

Load Google Analytics Data into SAP BW is possbile

Overview

In the previous post, I have initialized our Analytics Client with OAuth. As I promised, we are over the hard part of the authentication. This is where things get interesting. In this post I will be implementing the remaining 2 steps in our workflow. As a result, we will be able to Execute a Query and Save it to a CSV file. By the end of this post, we will have a working prototype of our Google Analytics Extractor that can generate a file interface for uploading it to BW.

Load Google Analytics Data into SAP BW - Part III: Preparation of Extractor with Console Application

26. May 2015 in Data Warehousing, Extraction, DW Developers by sapbwmentor

Overview

In my previous post I have showed the usage of the Google Api Query Explorer and I chose the right parameters for my query after some testing. Now it's time to start implementing our extractor. In this post I will be preparing the skeleton of the solution that I feel as a very important step. In the past, I was always jumping directly to coding without knowing exactly how I want my solution works. In most of the cases it was a big failure since I can get lost in the details very fast. So in order to keep focused on my problem, I design first the skeleton of my program with empty methods expressing my intention about how I expect the solution should work. It's very good to start thinking only on high level because it will be a safety belt that we can grab when digging into the details. Start always with surprisingly simple things and solve more and more complex problems step by step! That worked for me so many times!

Load Google Analytics Data into SAP BW - Part II: Google API Query Explorer

13. May 2015 in Data Warehousing, Extraction, DW Developers by sapbwmentor

Overview

Let's continue where I left my previous post: ( Load Google Analytics Data into SAP BW - Part I: The Data Flow)

I have already prepared a simple data flow with the Data Flow Wizard in SAP BW with an Excel source. Any source that can provide tha same schema that my Excel table follows can be uploaded to SAP BW for further riporting and analytics. In this post I want to explore the capabilities of our source system called Google Analytics. It's very important to get familiar with the source system in order to develop automated data extraction.

Load Google Analytics Data into SAP BW - Part I: The Data Flow

22. March 2015 in Data Warehousing, Extraction, DW Developers by sapbwmentor

Overview

One of the most challenging part of Data Warehousing is to find the right way of extracting external data. Recently I have got a question about Google Analytics:

Google analytics data, is there any idea how to consume it in BW ?

For the first sight, I was thinking, "well it's challenging", because I went through the different standard tools for connecting data to BW and I didn't find an obvious solution:

  • SAP Service API ? No, Google is not an SAP source system
  • DB connect ? No, Google is not a DB system like Oracle or MSSQL
  • File ? Maybe yes, if I can manage the automatic download to csv...
  • Web Service ? Maybe yes, if I can manage the automatic download and conversion, but it's similar to the File interface problem...

How to use Rule Groups in BW Transformation

10. March 2015 in Data Warehousing, DW Developers by sapbwmentor

Overview

Based on my experience, many BW developers use transformation and many of them implement ABAP in several places: Start Routine, End Routine, Field calculation etc. So these options are widely used and known. During my trainings I receive questions from developers where we come to the conclusion that many people miss the opportunities and the power of the Rule Groups. I agree, this function hides behind a dropdown list and we can easily miss it. In this post I want to highlight the functionality behind the hiding Rule Groups dropdown list.