Stragglers to the archive

Archiving of DataStore objects was previously performed on the basis of time slices. An archived time slice is locked and write-protected by the BW system.

If, after archiving, a document belonging to this time slice, a so-called straggler, is to be transferred to the Business Warehouse, it is rejected because of the time slice lock.

The document data is therefore not available for reporting. The lock can only be removed by reloading the archived data. The data must then be re-archived together with the straggler.

Therefore, much data remains in the database longer than necessary and the benefits of archiving to nearline storage cannot be realized.

The way out of this dilemma is offered by the straggler management in CBW NLS. It enables the archiving of stragglers and their updating for DataStore objects.

Straggler management is activated by a few administrative steps: First, the update with writing to the error stack is activated for the data transfer process of the affected DataStore object. Then, additional objects are generated for each affected DataStore object using a PBS-specific administration transaction.

After activation, all stragglers can be easily transferred to Nearline Storage and posted.

Once the stragglers have been updated with the corresponding PBS transaction, they are included in reporting. In addition, they can be included in the update in the subsequent objects, such as InfoCubes, using the generated objects.

Thanks to this new functionality in PBS CBW NLS, archiving of DataStore objects in BW no longer needs to be abandoned. On the contrary, it enables more aggressive DSO archiving.

Due to the high data compression and the very short response times of the SAP IQ and IBM DB2 BLU nearline databases used, a significantly improved SAP BW system performance is achieved at lower operating costs.

Advantages

CBW NLS achieves high data compression through the column-based NLS database. Very fast NLS data access shortens the query runtime.

An additional performance increase is achieved for queries with navigation attributes and hierarchies.

A smaller primary database simplifies the transition to BW on Hana. The Straggler Management solution from PBS supports the Unicode conversion of the BW system.