The administration services
in SAP BW can be availed through Administration Workbench (AWB). It is a
single point of entry for data warehouse development, administration and
maintenance tasks in SAP BW with Metadata modeling component, scheduler and
monitor as its main components as described in the figure hereunder:
Figure: Metadata Services Architecture
Metadata modeling: Metadata
modeling component is the main entry point for defining the core metadata
objects used to support reporting and analysis. This includes everything
from defining the extraction process and implementing transformations to
defining flat or multidimensional objects for storage of information.
Modeling Features
Metadata modeling provides a Metadata Repository where all the
metadata is stored and a Metadata Manager that handles all the requests
for retrieving, adding, changing, or deleting metadata.
Reporting and scheduling mechanism: Reporting and scheduling are the
processes required for the smooth functioning of SAP BW. The various
batch processes in the SAP BW need to be planned to provide timely
results, avoid resource conflicts by running too many jobs at a time and
to take care of logical dependencies between different jobs. These
processes are controlled in the scheduler component of AWB. This is
achieved by either scheduling single processes independently or defining
process chains for complex network of jobs required to update the
information available in the SAP BW system. Reporting Agent controls
execution of queries in a batch mode to print reports, identify
exception conditions and notify users and pre compute results for web
templates.
Administering ETL service layer in multi- tier level: SAP�s ETL
service layer provides services for data extraction, data transformation
and loading of data. It also serves as the staging area for intermediate
data storage for quality assurance purposes. The extraction technology
of SAP BW is supported by database management systems of mySAP
technology and does not allow extraction from other database systems
like IBM, IMS and Sybase. It does not support dBase, MS Access and MS
Excel file formats. However, it provides all the functionality required
for loading data from non- SAP systems as the ETL services layer provide
open interfaces for loading non-SAP data.
