Version and General Details:

Current BW 7.4 SP level is SP5. SP6 also released but as prelims, SP6 is expected by mid march.

Overview

There are many new features are there and major changes are mainly goes to HANA Modelling and Integration. That I am not covering much here, as this blog is for more abot BW related features.

BW Related new features:

Data Modeling:

1. Open ODS view - A Meta data object, which can modelled on a Table, view and Datasource.

May be a Infosource but without Infoobject.

2. Composite provider - Union or join for HANA and BW infoprovider

3. A new type source system introduced for ODP. In this there wont be a PSA, DTPs will fetch data directly. ALE/Idocs and qRFC outbounds are eliminated. its now Synchronous RFC.

4. The characteristic length has been extended upto 250 Char and their long text is extended upto 1333 chars.

Data Maintenance:

1. Process chains; Now can be stopped and restarted after doing some some changes in current or next step. Some processes can be skipped and Auto repeated

2. House Keeping; New monitor for display no of requests in a target, whether this is in risk state and to schedule jobs for house keeping the request.

3. SLT can be used for data transmission.

4. DTPs for Hierarchy, means request based data loading for hierarchy. I think, earlier we can load hierarchies only thro Infopackage.

5. Copying planning functions. (But I have did it earlier, dont remember that version)

Reporting:

1. Exception aggregation is now multi dimensional, we can add up to 5 reference characteristics for aggregation

2. One more member for replacement path - “Current Member”. Restricted keyfigures can be created on top of this to time characteristics. It will change dynamically with drilldowns.

3. There is option to enable a BEx query with “Easy Query”, Which create a SOAP for BEx Query (Web service)

Features removed:

1. Some BEx 3.5 features are removed.

2. SAP GUI tools, the 3.5 BEx tools are not going to be there any more.

3. Infospoke is removed. replacement is new concepts of Open hub destination.

Hope this blog get comments on features which are not covered here....

Thanks for reading!!