Any SAP BW experts out there?

[neilchills]

Hi all,

Does anyone have experience with SAP BW?

I'm trying to get to the data extracted from R3 in what has been termed the 'PSA of the ODS'. I'm told it is a flat file but I can't find information on how to access it and what it looks like.

Does anyone have a manual or notes on how to do it?

MTIA

[dttheliman]

go on over to www.sapfans.com and post this on their forum, reasonable bunch there but you may wait a while for an answer - most users are in the US

Tim

[toni896]

neilchills said:

Hi all,

Does anyone have experience with SAP BW?

I'm trying to get to the data extracted from R3 in what has been termed the 'PSA of the ODS'. I'm told it is a flat file but I can't find information on how to access it and what it looks like.

Does anyone have a manual or notes on how to do it?

MTIA

I dont know SAP as such, however they produce a flatfile called an IDoc, dependong how it's extracted it can either be a proper flatfile or XML representation.

[dttheliman]

BW is a black art and uses info-cubes , while idocs are a common tool for data,

Been in SAP since 1985 - but don't go anywhere near BW - however a simple extract from the R/3 system might be all you need to do - BW gets its info from SAP (or the Legacy its hooked up to ) now the info you asked for is not clearly defined, perhaps you need to go back to the originator and get him to be explicit about what he wants, if you give me a better description I can perhaps help you - or get you the info you require.

Tim

[neilchills]

idocs sounds ideal especially the text file flavour. Are idocs used to extract data for import into BW or does it have a different mechamism?

Would it be feasible for me to ask for an idoc of the columns in the, say Sales, Infocube (columns of each of the dimensions and fields that would be aggregated in the fact table, say invoice line value).

So that would be things like salesperson, customer name, customer address, product code, product name etc etc.

Is there an interface for selecting idoc content or is it programmatical via ABAP?

This could be limited to a months worth of data to keep volumes reasonable.

Does this make sense?

[dttheliman]

Neil ,

A reasonable simple ABAP - you just need to know what tables etc you will need to use send me a email - I will send you a doc around some of teh tables - but should be the main tables you need.

Tim

[LongQ]

neilchills said:

I'm told it is a flat file but I can't find information on how to access it and what it looks like.

Can you open it in notepad/wordpad (or basic text editor of your choice) and if you can does it look like it might having anything meaningful in it assuming you knew what data was likely and even, maybe, where it was positioned?

If so there is a good chance you can extract the info to whatever format you want without too much difficulty. I could make some further sugegstions on that.

If it is by any chance a delimited file even better. But it probably isn't.

[neilchills]

Thanks for you help guys! Think I've got enough good questions to ask.

Tim, thanks for the ABAP offer - really appreciated. Who said Pistonheads was just about cars!

Cheers,

Neil