Non-SAP R3 Data Source Loading Methods

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Non-SAP R/3 Data Source Loading Methods

One of the key requirements for a data warehouse is that the environment must be able to accept data from several data sources in a seamless fashion. I have yet to see one enterprise data warehouse that does not use flat files to load data. Flat files are an inexpensive method of preparing a data feed for the data warehouses. However, flat files do require manual work to prepare and move to the right place at the right time for the data warehouse to load data.

In the SAP BW environment, the data sources could be SAP R/3 OLTP instances, other ERP package applications, flat data files, or data from data providers such as Nielsen. In Chapters 8 and 9, you learned how SAP BW loads data when the data source is an SAP R/3 OLTP system. SAP BW provides the following three methods to load non-SAP R/3 data:

• Flat Files

• Staging Business API (BAPI)

• Data Providers

In this chapter, you learn how to load data in SAP BW via flat data files. Loading data from flat files is a simple process. However, implementing staging BAPIs and data providers to load data in SAP BW is a complex process. For this reason, several data extraction tool vendors have implemented staging BAPIs in their products to easily implement data loading schemes in SAP BW. The staging BAPI implementations enable you to automatically load data in SAP BW after extracting data from any data source, such as DB2, Informix, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, or other proprietary data sources that a third-party tool can read data from. You learn about staging BAPIs and data provider implementation in Chapter 14, "Integrating Third-Party Products with SAP BW."

Note 

In traditional data warehouses, large data volumes are often loaded using bulk-load utilities provided by the database vendors. These utilities are fast and highly optimized. However, SAP BW 1.2B does not support any database-specific bulk-load options. Though database-specific bulk-loading utilities provide highly optimized services, they do not provide needed information to SAP BW warehouse managers to track all aspects of data flows from sources to destinations. No bulk-load services are planned for SAP BW version 2.0.

SAP exploits its own platform-independent data movement technologies, such as IDOCs and tRFC. These technologies provide a reliable mechanism to move data between data sources and the target. These services provide additional data management facilities, such as temporary data storage, simulation of uploads prior to actual updates, error and corrections, and guaranteed delivery. SAP data movement technologies also provide compressions services that improve overall data movement performance across the network.

The difference between the two technologies is that the database-centric bulk load services are designed to only optimize the data loading process in a database specific to a database engine and are not aware of any analytical application logic. On the other hand, the SAP data movement technologies are designed to optimize and manage data movement across several platforms, and data load services are built on top of a database engine, bypassing database-specific bulk load services.

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