In this blog post we will make an overview of the new features in SAP Business Warehouse 7.3 and why companies should upgrade their current BW system to the newest release.
The new SAP BW 7.3 system provides business users and consultants with a lot of new useful services. One of the big innovations comes around BW Integrated Planning, where a bunch of new features targeting top performance of planning applications are introduced. Moreover, as of this release the planning modeler utilizes an ABAP UI environment. It is also clear that SAP put a lot of effort in the integration between BW and Business Objects tools in order to combine the extremely powerful and robust ETL platform with nice and easy-to-use data visualization. As one of the biggest drivers of modern BI, the BW Accelerator is now packed with more features as well.
But for us, the new data warehousing functions are the most exciting. Let’s see some examples without striving for completeness:
- Wizard based system configuration and set-up
- Wizard-based partitioning of InfoCubes and DSO-s
- Faster activation process of DSO objects
- Wizard for fast dataflow model creation
- Predefined dataflow model templates with graphical interface for editing
- Copy functionality for existing dataflow models
- Copy functionality for process chains
- Automatic switching of infopackages from initial to delta loading in the context of process chains
- HybridProvider type I - new InfoProvider that combines an InfoCube and an RDA enabled DSO
- HybridProvider type II - new InfoProvider that combines an InfoCube and a virtual provider
- New tool for developing and testing MDX queries
- Full integration for loading of hierarchies
- Support of XML format and extraction of hierarchies with Open Hub services
- Delta methods for datasources using DB connect or flat file interface
- Enhancements in Real-time Data Acquisition processes (RDA)
- Support of Teradata and HP Neoview databases
- New monitors and queries for easier administration
- Improved administration of process chains
- Direct access to near-line storage for MultiProviders
We were from the first ones to download and install the new version of SAP BW 7.3 and since then we get more and more excited every day. It is easier, feature-rich and with amazing performance. In our next blogs, we will be discussing in more details the different features and which business cases they support.