PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENTS OF DATASTORE OBJECTS IN SAP BW 7.

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20. May 2013 0Comments in Data Warehousing, Extraction, Reporting by sapbwmentor
This blog post concentrates on the exciting performance improvements with regard
s to DataStore Objects in SAP Business Warehouse 7.3
In a previous blog post we gave an overview of the cool new features of SAP BW 7
.3. Now let s focus on the changes with regards to DSO.
Partitioning of the DSO Active Table
In previous releases of BW we could partition E tables of InfoCubes, which resul
ted in big gains in performance. This cool feature is now also available for the
active table of Standard DSO-s. The big advantage is in much faster response wh
en the data request contains the portioning relevant characteristic. The DSO par
titioning can be set up only on a key field referring to a time characteristic a
nd the configuration has to be done when the DSO is empty.
Mass Lookups
The activation of requests of the Standard DSO happens package by package. Techn
ically, the system compares the key from the packages with the key of the record
s in the existing active table. Earlier this process happened record by record,
but as of BW 7.3 it happens at once for all records contained in a package. This
decreases the total time for activation by 10-30 % depending on the used databa
se platform.
Request Based Unique Data Records Setting
As a first step of the activation process the system reads the active table of t
he DSO and checks whether there is any existing data with the same key as the da
ta coming from the new records table. Of course, with big active tables this pro
cess is very time consuming. The unique data records setting comes into play whe
n we are 100% sure that the active table does not contain any records with the s
ame key as the record that we want to activate. In this case the system skips pa
rt of the comparison checks and pushes the data in the active table much faster.
Until now, this was a specific setting done by the initial DSO configuration to
gether with the DSO type and SID generation properties. In SAP BW 7.3 this setti
ng is available to be switched on and off for every request in the activation qu
eue. It is especially useful if you have just loaded a single request that conta
ins only unique data records and you want to optimize the activation process. A
typical business example of a use case would be the initial load of data for a c
ompletely new organization entity in an already existing DSO.
New Activation Method for Databases with Massive Parallel Processing
During the activation process the records, which are in the request are split in
to packages by BW. However, the split is not random. The records with the same k
ey are placed into one and the same package to ensure the original sequence and
thus to guarantee data consistency. As of SAP BW 7.3 the activation process of s
tandard DSO can utilize the massive parallel processing feature that certain dat
abases provide. With this new technique, the data activation is done by the data
base engine instead of the SAP application server. Technically it means that sev
eral big processes on the database layer process the data to be activated in par
allel on all database partitions where the DataStore object resides. This new me
thod can improve performance 2-3 times during activation.
New rule type in Transformations: Read DSO
Until now, every experienced BW consultant had to write routines in transformati
ons in order to call and use data from a reference DSO. The BW 7.3 version alrea
dy supports this natively and the cool new feature is similar to master data rea
d rule type. Performance is also impressive as the actual data read is done once

per package and not once per record. With that in mind it is only up to the tas
te of the developer, whether to write the logic in ABAP or use this amazing new
functionality.