SAP BW/4HANA is SAP’s next generation data warehouse, optimized to run only on SAP HANA. It is SAP’s most powerful data warehouse to date and adds in-memory processing to provide incredible performance and new levels of simplicity.
Since the arrival of the game changing SAP HANA, it was only a matter of time before BW would be reinvented to power high performance data acquisition and analytics. But BW/4HANA is about more than just speed. It has lost the complexity that was needed to support non-HANA databases, meaning modelling has become simpler, which in turn has lead to greater agility.
Whilst it holds on to many of the design principles first developed with classic BW, BW/4HANA is a brand new solution with a fresh approach. It is critical to invest in BW/4HANA education for your employees to maximize the full potential of your BW/4HANA implementation. Experienced BW team members must “unlearn” some approaches which are no longer optimal for BW/4HANA, learning instead new techniques to ensure the HANA in-memory engines do all the heavy work.
Those who are already experienced with classic BW should upgrade their skills now, so they are fully prepared to participate in BW/4HANA projects. This means :
- Using the new BW/4HANA user interfaces that have been redesigned to support modelling data models and data flows, query building and administration.
- Working with new modelling approaches which lean heavily towards a virtualised data warehouse and mixing SQL based data models from native HANA.
- Using the new best practices for BW/4HANA with LSA++, instead of the old LSA
- Taking advantage of the staggering data integration possibilities. BW/4HANA can consume any type of data, from anywhere. You need to learn how to connect both physical and virtual data sources
- Understanding how to manage data temperatures. What is hot, warm, cool, cold data? We’ll show you.
To begin your BW/4HANA journey, a great place to start is the openSAP course ‘BW/4HANA in a Nutshell’. This provides a high level overview and builds a great foundation. You should then move on to develop core BW/4HANA skills by taking further SAP Education courses where you will go deeper and develop practical skills with plenty of hands-on opportunities.
If you already have SAP BW experience you should follow one of our new delta courses - the detailed 5 day
BW462 , for those upskilling from classic (non-HANA) BW, or the 2 day
DBW4H for those upskilling from BW Powered by HANA. Both delta courses bring you to the same outcome: new skills in BW/4HANA so you are fully prepared to be an effective member of the project team.
We have also just launched a new certification -
E_BW4HANA_13 - SAP Certified Application Specialist - SAP BW to SAP BW/4HANA (based on the BW462 course), so consultants can gain a qualification to prove their knowledge.
But what if you are completely new to BW? We have been busy developing courses suitable for those without any SAP BW background, to cover all key areas of BW/4HANA. Already available are the
BW405 (Query Design) and
BW410 (Data Warehousing), with courses for Data Modeling (BW430) and Data Acquisition (BW450) expected in Q1 2018.
Don’t forget, we also have an active SAP Learning Room in SAP Learning Hub -
‘SAP BW powered by SAP HANA & SAP BW/4HANA Learning Room’. This room has many members already benefiting from the support and guidance of BW/4HANA instructors and experts.
