Major difference between BW3.5 and BI 7.

0 version
1. In Infosets now you can include Infocubes as well. 2. The Remodeling transaction helps you add new key figure and characteristics and handles historical data as well without much hassle. This is only for info cube. 3. The BI accelerator (for now only for infocubes) helps in reducing query run time by almost a factor of 10 - 100. This BI accl is a separate box and would cost more. Vendors for these would be HP or IBM. 4. The monitoring has been improved with a new portal based cockpit. Which means you would need to have an EP guy in ur project for implementing the portal! :) 5. Search functionality has improved!! You can search any object. Not like 3.5 6. Transformations are in and routines are passe! Yes, you can always revert to the old transactions too. 7. The *Data Warehousing Workbench *replaces the Administrator Workbench. 8. Functional enhancements have been made for the *DataStore object*: New type of DataStore object Enhanced settings for performance optimization of DataStore objects. 9. The *transformation* replaces the transfer and update rules. 10. New *authorization objects* have been added 11.*Remodeling *of InfoProviders supports you in Information Lifecycle Management. 12 the DataSource: There is a new object concept for the *DataSource* . Options for *direct access* to data have been enhanced. From BI, *remote activation* of DataSources is possible in SAP source systems. 13. There are functional changes to the Persistent Staging Area (PSA). 14. BI supports real-time data acquisition. 15 SAP BW is now known formally as BI (part of Net Weaver 2004s). It implements the Enterprise Data Warehousing (EDW). The new features/ Major differences include: a)Renamed ODS as DataStore. b)Inclusion of Write-optimized DataStore which does not have any change log and the requests do need any activation c)Unification of Transfer and Update rules d)Introduction of "end routine" and "Expert Routine" e)Push of XML data into BI system (into PSA) without Service API or Delta Queue

f)Introduction of BI accelerator that significantly improves the performance. g) Load through PSA has become a must. I am not too sure about this. It looks like we would not have the option to bypass the PSA during data load. i think these are sufficient !

Here are some features of the BI 7.0 Version

1.No Update rules or Transfer rules(Not mandatory in data flow) 2.Instead of update rules and Transfer rules new concept introduced called transformations. 3. New ODS introduced in additional to the Standard and transactional. 4. ODS is renamed as DataStore to meet with the global data warehousing standards. And lot more changes in the functionalities of BEx query designer and WAD etc.