Business environment is changing at a rapid pace and so is the fierceness in competition.
Today's business demands decision at the speed of thought . It is obvious that such decisions need most efficient information acquisition, integration, transformation and finally presentation in the most efficient way at a matching speed and without increasing the cost of doing so. A data warehouse is set up in a company with a clear focus to support the decision support system, involving collecting useful information, harmonizing it and transforming and finally presenting it for answering business questions. For instance, What is the sales trend of a specific material?
It is an established fact that most SAP BW projects succeed when they deliver the above objectives by providing:
1. The ability to acquire data from various data sources such as the OLTP system and present accurate information.
2. A capacity to provide drill-down or slice-n-dice capability for analyzing the different perspectives of the information.
3. Decision support enablers such as self-service options, exception reporting etc.
However, these parameters are primarily of academic interest and translate into real success only when a decision maker finds it acceptable. Performance tuning directly influences the degree of user acceptance as it delivers a quick response to a user's call.
More specifically, performance influences, on time availability of data, response time to query execution, response time for drill down and so on. The performance is also an important criterion for reducing the TCO, as performance here relates to efficient use of database, lower load on system resources, availability of system, and availability of bandwidth.
In this book the authors have listed performance tuning parameters right through the data model, including extraction of data, data loading, fine tuning of the database, concluding with proactive operational maintenance mode (e.g. review aggregates, build new ones, delete unused ones, find problem queries) as an ongoing cycle.
Also covered in this book is how to go about evaluating the actual performance; whether there is scope for improvement or other avenues of performance tuning need to be explored.
This book is written specifically with reference to the subject of Performance for SAP BW version 3.X on an Oracle database, but most of the content is equally applicable for any versions of BW.
