APO BW - Are there limits in usage?

[Former Member]

Hello,

Does one of you know if there are limits to the usage of the APO-BW?

As far as I know it is a full BW system.Only disadvantage of course is that one can not go to higher release independant from APO.

We have only limited reporting requirements and also do not need BW als data collector for various other systems.

So we try to avoid the usage of a seperate BW system and want to use APO-BW for data preparation and consolidation.

Does someone have experience with such a topic?

Thanks

Stefan

[srinivas_krishnamoorthy · Accepted solution]

Based on my understanding lite reporting can always be done around APO BW infocubes and infoobjects. One can browse through the infocubes with normal BW interface such as Business Explorer. The APO BW though is not optimized for doing very intensive reporting. typically APO BW is backed up from APO Planning area which itself has keyfigure & characteristic limitations (beyond 40 keyfigures APO DP begins to choke). The full-fledged BW though does not have this 40 key figure restriction as it is desgined to handle lot of reporting. BW OLAP architecture is supposed to meet this very need of doing intensive reporting.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Thanks for the quick answer.

I understand that APO-BW is not designed for intensive reporting.

Main part we want to do is loading data from R3 and external system and consolidate data for further usage in APO.

So ourproblem is probably not so much the complexity but more the pure amount of data. Of course we need enough hard disk for this. But can a very big BW scenario have a bad influence of "normal" APO usage (Live cache, other programms...) ?

[srinivas_krishnamoorthy · Accepted solution]

based on my understanding the answer is No. If you are not constrained by disk space, you can have a big BW. APO Live cache is supported in a different server typically allocated with a certain memory. I cannot comment on the BW functionality per se since I guess APO BW may not be as optimized as the normal BW.

[Former Member]

Hello Stefan,

From an enterprise datawarehouse perspective, the resources of the built-in BW server in the APO box might not be able to handle the volume of the data. So if you are pulling data form various datasource (e.g. SD, FI, other non-SAP ) to drive a report then it will be best to actually do this in a separate BW server (e.g. the enterprise Datawarehouse).

The available BW functionality is also constrained by the components are installed in your APO Box. For example, in BI/BW 7.0, an installation of the portal is needed before you can use BI 7.0 style queries. So if you have an APO box without a portal installed, then you can only use BI 3.x style queries (and not the BI 7.0 style queries).

However, the built-in BW in APO should be sufficient in handling ETL (extraction, cleansing, consoloidation etc). For example, in DP the built-in BW might already be sufficient to retrieve data from sourcesystems and then load this data to the Planning Area.