Product Description

Business Information Warehouse is the core information hub of all modules in SAP. This book shows you how to implement a data warehouse that can support reporting and analysis needs across diverse organizations and business functions. The author, Naeem Hashmi, was a member of the BW development team at SAP and covers just what you need to know to get to the core of the system and to the top of your field.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1638667 in Books
• Published on: 2000-08-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 480 pages

Customer Reviews

Decent overview, but confusing and not focused
Overall this is a decent introduction to SAP Business Warehouse. However, one of the biggest flaws of the book is that trys to overview two different versions. It would be much better if it simply stuck with reviewing against one version of SAP BW (preferably the most recent). It makes some of the concepts and movement through the BW interface very confusing because of the way it switchs back and forth between the two versions.

The content on the accompanying CD is really useless. Nothing of any good informative nature. The best way to read the book is to skim through the first dozen chapters to get a feel for the environment, and then read the last chapters in depth for a good understanding of how to model in SAP BW.

Too Little - Too Late
As a BW consultant, I found the content to be untimely (mostly based on version 1.2B) and incomplete. I purchased this book when it first came out hoping for a resource that was more comprehensive and insightful. What I found was what appeared to be a collection of disconnected "whitepapers". In short, the need for a comprehensive 'How-to' guide to BW remains unfulfilled.

Well explained, but no detailed step-by-step cooking recipes
There aren't many books about SAP's business warehouse. I think this one is by far the best. It is also the first one to cover the latest versions 2a and a bit of 2b. The drawback is that it is spread out over 1.2b, 2a and 2b. This means you constantly have to filter information and consider what is relevant to your own system. This does not make a difficult topic any easier. The general availability version became available about the same time this book was published. Perhaps one reason it is noticeably short on 2.0b features, although it does briefly cover the new ODS (not to be confused with the old 1.2b ODS which has been renamed PSA).

One of the nice points about this book is a list of places to find more information, from third party tools, to performance benchmarks, useful websites and other interesting books.

Hashmi is very good at explaining the concept behind BW. This is important because just mastering the technical aspects of customizing is not enough. You have to have an idea how you should design everything, what makes sense and what doesn't. He does start to explain how you can actually implement your solutions, but I had been hoping for him to do this more extensively. Much more extensively. Ideally, I would have liked him to take a few fairly simple reports and - in each relevant chapter: data extraction, ODS, infocube, query, update and transformation rules, uploading data, etc., - show in detail how to customize the different parts of BW and discuss the pros and cons of different solutions. I realize that this would have made the book a lot thicker, but manuals covering Microsoft's office applications routinely fill a 1000 pages.

My advice: Read this book and then take a training course or two.