Rating: 
Summary: Too Little - Too Late
Review: As a BW consultant, I found the content to be untimely (mostly based on version 1.2B) and incomplete. I purchased this book when it first came out hoping for a resource that was more comprehensive and insightful. What I found was what appeared to be a collection of disconnected "whitepapers". In short, the need for a comprehensive 'How-to' guide to BW remains unfulfilled.
Rating: 
Summary: The Truth is here!
Review: Editorial ReviewThe next big thing after the Y2K obsession is to build e-business solutions--the B2B, B2C, and C2C stuff that everyone is talking about. Right in the center of e-business strategy sits a dynamic corporate information-supply framework that ties business and decision-support applications together--not point to point, but rather in an integrated fashion. This is where the SAP Business Information Warehouse (BW) fits in the information supply chain. The real value of a data warehouse is not to collect data; but rather how well it becomes an integral component of the corporate information-supply framework to capture, manage, and provide the right information at the right place and right time. This is what William H. Inmon, the father of data warehousing, envisioned a corporate information factory. BW is an implementation of such vision. Book Description This book is intended for a wide array of professionals who want to learn BW from an information warehousing perspective, not just as an extension to the SAP R/3 reporting environment. Data warehouse construction issues that face large companies and how BW addresses such issues is discussed. This book covers BW versions 1.2B, 2.0A, and 20B.It is a complete guide that gives information ranging from making a case for SAP BW to step-by-step instructions on BW installation, activating business content; data loading from SAP R/3, flat files, and third-party ETL tools using staging BAPI; data modeling, defining your custom InfoCubes, reporting using BEX, and ODBO-based 3rd Party tools to build pure Web applications using, and building custom extractors The book's 17 chapters provide step-by-step how-to instructions on constructing information objects, with more than 200 illustrations make this book a "BW through pictures" reference. The 570MB CD-ROM contains data warehouse material from several data warehouse vendors, a list of data warehouse reference books and Web sites, and several Lotus ScreenCam movies that provide a visual working of BW 1.2B and BW 2.0A.. This book also covers BW 2.0B to describe how to build an operational data store (ODS); how to build multi-cubes, how to build InfoCubes to ODS drill-down schemes; and how to design dynamic WEB reports. To provide this broad and comprehensive view of BW, the book is divided in four parts: PART 1: Introduction to Data Warehousing and SAP Business Information Warehouse (4 chapters) 1) Constructing a Data Warehouse 2) Evolution of SAP Business Information Warehouse 3) Comparing SAP BW with data warehouse solutions provided by other vendors 4) Getting started with SAP BW PART 2: Implementing SAP BW (7 chapters) 1) Planning for SAP BW implementation 2) Setting up SAP BW 3) SAP BW - The Administrator Workbench 4) SAP BW - Loading Business Content 5) Preparing R/3 data sources for SAP BW initial data loads 6) Loading Data via Flat Files 7) Analyzing SAP BW Data PART 3: Designing Custom SAP BW OLAP Solutions 1) SAP BW - Defining Custom InfoCubes (6 Chapters) 2) Enhancing Business Content and developing Data Extractors 3) Integrating 3rd party ETL products with SAP BW (Staging BAPI) 4) Integrating 3rd party data access products with SAP BW (ODBO) 5) SAP BW Performance and Tuning 6) The Operational Data Store in SAP BW 2.0 PART 4: Appendixes (4) 1) SAP BW, SAP R/3 and Data Warehouse References 2) SAP BW and SAP R/3 Transactions, Tables, and Code Examples 3) Appendix C: Selected SAP BW OSS Notes 4) Appendix D: Key Enhancements in SAP BW 2.0 (WEB Reporting) CD-ROM (570 MB) 1) ScreenCam Movies to give you a visual tour of BW working. 2) Data Warehouse Industry references 3) Reference and product material from Third party data warehouse vendors The author, Naeem Hashmi I'd like to thank Prima Tech for giving me an opportunity to share my years of learning with professionals eager to learn about emerging technological advances in the ERP business intelligence world, and the amazon.com for spreading the word. As long as BW has been around, I have been a major contributor to its development, even way back in 1996 when the project was called Reporting Server. In January 1998, I directed BW 1.0E (the early customer program) at Digital Equipment Corporation, and later 1.2A and 1.2B for Compaq Computer Corporation. Before departing Compaq, I was a technical director for the Compaq Database and Business Intelligence Marketing Group for SAP BW 1.2B benchmark project and then advised the team for BW 2.0 benchmarks. Last year, I was the technical member of the ASUG ODS design team that defined ODS architecture in SAP BW 2.0. At present, I am a Chief Technology Officer at the Information Frameworks, a research and development advisory group, to provide strategic emerging technologies consulting to fortune 100 companies. I often speak at national conferences on emerging information technologies and implementation strategies. I also consult with just about all data warehouse construction tools vendors on their product architectures and design. For more than 22 years, I have been involved in developing emerging technologies, ranging from global Distributed Object Oriented applications to ERP, business intelligence, CRM, global IT architectures, product engineering, Internet, EDI, and e-commerce technologies, Relational to Object DBMS technologies, global OLTP and Business Intelligence implementations, strategic IT consulting, and marketing. I am also a nuclear physicist and radiological health and environmental scientist with specialties in high-performance computing and analytics (data mining). I worked in the academic world for eight years prior to joining Digital Equipment Corporation in 1987 to lead a team of engineers to architect, design, and implement a Distributed Object Oriented global CIM system. In 1993, I moved to Digital's Corporate Advanced Technology and Planning Group and initiated technical assessment of SAP R/3. While the business community was looking at business functionality, we were learning R/3 data integration technologies, such as RFC, EDI, and CORBA-based services to design wrappers for SAP R/3 integration. My primary project was to exploit SAP R/3 technologies for data warehousing and EAI frameworks in building a stand-alone reporting instance. In April 1996, I gave a presentation at DCI Data Warehouse World in San Jose, California, on how to capitalize on SAP ALE and LIS technologies to construct a data warehouse. In September that year, I spoke at an ASUG session in Boston, Massachusetts, on Digital's future ERP data warehouse progress. It was there that I learned about the SAP Reporting Server project and became connected with SAP engineering. Today, I continue to work very closely with the engineering team in providing technical product architecture; I recently worked with the SAP ODS engineering team to architect ODS for BW 2.0. I often speak at national and international conferences, such as SAP TechED, BW Congress, Oracle Open World, ERP World, Internet-eCommerce Technologies, DCI Data Warehouse World, and Data Warehouse Institute. I am an editorial member of the Intelligence ERP magazine and write on the emerging technologies and advise leading business IT vendors on their product architectures...
Rating: 
Summary: Dated, but still a good book for me
Review: I agree with many of the otehr reviewers out there: there's no real cookbook for BW, and this one complicates matters by trying to cover two versions at once. But for me, it's proven to be a great book because it doesn't assume I'm an expert. As a new member of an existing BW Support team, I don't have to ask as many "stupid" questions now that I has this. And I got a great price on a used copy!
Rating: 
Summary: Decent overview, but confusing and not focused
Review: Overall this is a decent introduction to SAP Business Warehouse. However, one of the biggest flaws of the book is that trys to overview two different versions. It would be much better if it simply stuck with reviewing against one version of SAP BW (preferably the most recent). It makes some of the concepts and movement through the BW interface very confusing because of the way it switchs back and forth between the two versions. The content on the accompanying CD is really useless. Nothing of any good informative nature. The best way to read the book is to skim through the first dozen chapters to get a feel for the environment, and then read the last chapters in depth for a good understanding of how to model in SAP BW.
Rating:
Summary: A Bit Outdated
Review: The book is outdated and based on BW 1.2B.
Rating:
Summary: Good Reference book, if your on a BW proj, my 2 cents..
Review: There are so few BW books out there so one has to kind of hope for the best on this one. As a Basis team member, this is a great referece book. It needs an update however to accomodate the 2.0b and higher features more thoughly. There is some good performance information but still leaves you wanting much more in the way of BW statistics. Again, its very good for explanations of concepts, overviews, and general reference. The TABW90 class should give this book as a freebie with the course.
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Summary: Well explained, but no detailed step-by-step cooking recipes
Review: There aren't many books about SAP's business warehouse. I think this one is by far the best. It is also the first one to cover the latest versions 2a and a bit of 2b. The drawback is that it is spread out over 1.2b, 2a and 2b. This means you constantly have to filter information and consider what is relevant to your own system. This does not make a difficult topic any easier. The general availability version became available about the same time this book was published. Perhaps one reason it is noticeably short on 2.0b features, although it does briefly cover the new ODS (not to be confused with the old 1.2b ODS which has been renamed PSA). One of the nice points about this book is a list of places to find more information, from third party tools, to performance benchmarks, useful websites and other interesting books. Hashmi is very good at explaining the concept behind BW. This is important because just mastering the technical aspects of customizing is not enough. You have to have an idea how you should design everything, what makes sense and what doesn't. He does start to explain how you can actually implement your solutions, but I had been hoping for him to do this more extensively. Much more extensively. Ideally, I would have liked him to take a few fairly simple reports and - in each relevant chapter: data extraction, ODS, infocube, query, update and transformation rules, uploading data, etc., - show in detail how to customize the different parts of BW and discuss the pros and cons of different solutions. I realize that this would have made the book a lot thicker, but manuals covering Microsoft's office applications routinely fill a 1000 pages. My advice: Read this book and then take a training course or two.
Rating: 
Summary: Easily the best reference book for BW
Review: This book is the most complete reference for anybody who needs to know BW. Its coverage on Bex Analyzer, the query design, publishing and analytical interface, is too light. It also missed some of the 2.0b features. Nonetheless, I found the material coverage excellent and writing straightforward. I can safely say this book is a "must have" if you are implementing or learning BW. It will come in handy.
Rating:
Summary: Easily the best reference book for BW
Review: This book is the most complete reference for anybody who needs to know BW. Its coverage on Bex Analyzer, the query design, publishing and analytical interface, is too light. It also missed some of the 2.0b features. Nonetheless, I found the material coverage excellent and writing straightforward. I can safely say this book is a "must have" if you are implementing or learning BW. It will come in handy.
Rating:
Summary: Buy this book and sleep a little better
Review: This book would have saved me a lot of late night head-scratching, and I hope it can for you. I quickly scanned this book on my first reading. It's clearly organized and well-written. As a result, it's hard to imagine how hard Naeem worked to gain this knowledge, and incidentally get a system up. Early in the first few releases of BW, there was very little documentation of any sort. It was, and still is hard to tell what's supposed to work in the next patch, and what would work right now if only you were pushing the right buttons. All the early BW developers were pioneers, poring over cryptic OSS notes in the wee hours, reading code, and trying to map the landscape while building solutions. Now Naeem has built a fine map. Any beginning user of BW, whether a manager, project lead or developer, can get an excellent overview of the BW landscape from this work. But there is something for the experienced developer, too. There are enough technical tips to ensure that any reader will find something new and valuable. The diagrams are very helpful for explaining concepts to others, and you can be sure every BW trainer/consultant will have this book hidden in their bag. Drawbacks? This book is spread across three versions of BW from 1.2 to 2.0b. But then, so are the company, the customers, and the consultants. I would have liked to see more exit and transformation samples in the CD-ROM. The metamodel information was good, but I would like to see more. And don't think this is a BW step-by-step cookbook, because that doesn't exist. It's still hard. Bottom line? If you're working with BW, buy this book, and save your late night time for something more calming, like Quake.
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