SAP BW/4 HANA Interview Questions And Answers

1.  What is sap BW/4HANA?

Ans: SAP BW/4HANA is SAP’s latest and greatest in-memory, HANA-native, data warehousing solution that runs exclusively on SAP HANA. The naming convention used is consistent with their S/4HANA solution that came out 18 months ago. This shouldn’t come as a surprise as HANA is an essential piece of SAP’s long-term innovation roadmap.

2.Why should companies deploy SAP BW/4HANA? What are the benefits?

Ans:Companies deploy SAP BW/4HANA to achieve business agility. Because the warehouse structure has been hugely simplified, and it has a new data flow modeller, SAP BW/4HANA users can respond quickly and easily to the business needs of new models and to changes in current ones. With the help of SAP BW/4HANA objects, users are able to generate views automatically, edit them using any SQL tool, and visualize the data with SAP BusinessObjects Cloud or SAP Lumira. This makes agile database development possible, giving businesses better insights in real time and at lower cost.

In SAP BW/4HANA there are lots of flexible deployment options available in the cloud and on premise. Deployment in the cloud allows customers to set up their infrastructure quickly and flexibly, and provides great value for money. The cloud version of SAP BW/4HANA can currently be deployed through SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure.

3.How do SAP BW/4HANA and SAP S/4HANA relate?

Ans:SAP BW/4HANA is completely independent from SAP S/4HANA. Customers do not have to implement one to use the other. SAP S/4HANA Analytics can be used for operational reporting on data taken straight from S/4HANA systems. SAP BW/4HANA on the other hand is an advanced data warehouse that can be used to create reports on current, historical, and external data from a multitude of SAP and non-SAP sources.

4.Which analytics tools can be used with SAP BW/4HANA?

Ans:SAP BW/4HANA supports SAP BusinessObjects Cloud and SAP BusinessObjects BI. It also has interfaces open to third-party providers.

5.Is SAP BW/4HANA only for customers already on SAP?

Ans: No, it can be used for any data warehousing needs, for data from SAP and non-SAP sources alike.

6.Why should customers switch to SAP BW/4HANA if they have just upgraded to SAP BW 7.5?

Ans: The main benefits of SAP BW/4HANA for SAP BW on SAP HANA customers are its simplicity, openness, advanced UIs, and performance. As the road map shows, we plan to enhance the solution considerably in the three releases in the quarters ahead.

7.WHAT IS SAP TOUTING ABOUT SAP BW/4HANA?

Ans:Simplicity

• Over many years, SAP’s BW product has released many options and features, which has resulted in new customers wondering which options should be taken into consideration when embarking on a BW implementation journey. SAP has chosen to eliminate the unnecessary options and provide customers with more relevant, and easier to understand, choices to consider for their BW/4HANA implementations. BW/4HANA only offers building blocks that customers “should” be leveraging for the foreseeable future.

• Pre-built, standardized templates called, “Building Blocks” are leveraged for building a data warehouse. BW/4HANA models and data can be exposed as native HANA views and accessed through standard SQL, which is a huge upside for customers. These views can then be consumed by various visualization tools (i.e. BusinessObjects, Lumira, etc..).

• Let’s all say good riddance to SAP GUI. SAP has worked diligently to improve its UX across its various product lines and SAP customers are beginning to enjoy the fruits of
  SAP’s labor. This trend continues in SAP BW/4HANA. BusinessObjects Cloud provides a modern UX for visualization, storytelling, and data exploration. BW/4HANA can also be accessed by the digital boardroom. Finally, administrators should be excited because front ends are now accessed through HANA Studio and modern browsers.

High Performance

• Top-notch performance has been the SAP mantra for HANA since day one. So, expect no exceptions with BW/4HANA. This is the only data warehousing solution that was built from the ground up with optimal performance in mind. Expect significantly improved performance for data loading, querying, analysis, and staging.

8.How does SAP BW/4HANA fit in to SAP’s data warehousing strategy?

Ans: SAP continues to offer data warehousing customers an SAP SQL-based and business warehouse approach. SAP BW/4HANA is a model- or application-driven approach with highly-integrated services for data modeling, data management, monitoring and scheduling, and ETL. In the future, SAP BW/4HANA will be more interoperable with SQL-based data warehouses.

9.What are the components comprising SAP HANA technology?

Ans: SAP HANA is a technology that is a collection of different tools and technologies that work in tandem to bring it in existence. There are four technologies which collectively make SAPA HANA:

• SAP HANA DB: It is the core in-memory database which is central to the functioning of SAP HANA.
• SAP HANA Studio: It has the modeling tools for data handling and management.
• SAP HANA Appliance: It is the Vendor hardware in which we install SAP HANA software.
• SAP HANA Application Cloud: It is the cloud-based infrastructure ensuring the functioning of appliances.

10.Why is SAP HANA unique?

Ans: SAP HANA proves to be a unique tool for users in many ways. The reasons for uniqueness are:

• SAP HANA is the first technology ever to be used for both OLTP and OLAP application processing.
• It provides query processing environment for structured as well as unstructured data. That is, for both relational database (tables) and less structured (texts, graphs) respectively.
• The multi-core processing engines of the SAP HANA system process data parallelly. The parallel processing is done within different columns of the same database. Using a columnar database, the system optimizes data structure and eases storing large data by compressing it.

11.What is sizing in SAP HANA?

Ans: Sizing in SAP HANA refers to determining the hardware requirements for specific SAP HANA installation requirements. Hardware components important for sizing point of view are CPU, memory (RAM) and hard disk. The most crucial task in sizing is to estimate the size of the server best suited for the business user’s requirements.

In SAP HANA, we can perform sizing in three ways:

• Using Quick Sizer tool
• Using DB script
• Using ABAP report

12.What are the different perspectives in SAP HANA Studio?

Ans:The SAP HANA Studio contains different perspectives which we can choose to work on. Some commonly used perspectives are:

• SAP HANA Administration Console
• SAP HANA Modeler
• Application Development
• Lifecycle Management
• SAP HANA Development
• ABAP
• BW Modeling

13. Is sap BW/4HANA available on premise?

Ans: Not yet, but it will be. SAP is even discussing an on-premise Rapid Deployment Solution (RDS). SAP chose a “cloud first” approach for this launch through SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud (HEC) and Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS is their day-one announcement partner, but it’s expected that SAP will announce more partners shortly thereafter. AWS can support a 14TB scale-out cluster, running on seven of its X1 instances as certified by SAP. This allows BW/4HANA customers to try out, run, and optimize large workloads on AWS.

14.Will SAP BW/4HANA have the same capabilities as both the SAP BW 7.5 on SAP HANA releases?

Ans:SAP BW/4HANA has similar functions as SAP BW powered by SAP HANA. But SAP BW/4HANA processes only SAP HANA-optimized objects, which cuts modelling effort and the overall complexity of SAP BW/4HANA.

Following the SAP S/4HANA road map, within six months SAP BW/4HANA would differ significantly from SAP BW 7.5 powered by SAP HANA. SAP BW/4HANA is not valid for other database platforms.

15.What is the upgrade path for SAP BW customers?

Ans: The most efficient approach is to move to SAP BW 7.5 SP4 on HANA. This facilitates the conversion to the new object types and the activation of “HANA-only mode”, which prevents legacy objects from being created. This will be a single-step process for most customers.