It feels strange for me to make a post in the BW section as I feel horribly un-qualified to do this 
Below is a Video that Ethan Jewett and I co-created as part of the DSLayered video podcast series.
What we did was use the new and now native NLS functionality in BW 7.3 SP9 to archive data off into SAP Sybase IQ. This is something that I have been talking about for years (see this blog post dated 12 months ago) as I have had exposure to the PBS NLS add-on from my Sybase background.
You will be glad to know that the results were simply awesome and I feel that by implementing NLS now as part of your BW strategy could benefit customers in a few ways, namely:
- Get the immediate performance benefit of using SAP Sybase IQ ( ** spoiler alert ** SAP Sybase IQ was +- 300 % faster off the DSO level compared to BW running off an InfoCube)
- Shrink the size of the database under-lying your BW environment. This has many benefits:
- Smaller environment to query on = better performance
- Smaller environment to back up
- Etc etc
- Get customers ready for HANA and know that you have a seamless and slick archiving solution in place with no performance trade-offs. This also means that you do not have to panic about your HANA environment running away from you.
I would love to hear every-ones thoughts/opinions on this and I hope I got all the BW terminology correct 
Get the popcorn ready and enjoy the video