SAP BW has recently come to the fore as a valuable tool for developing data warehouses that accurately and effectively support critical business decision making. It facilitates easy-to-use and high-performance extraction, transfer, transformation, and loading of data from a variety of data sources, including such comprehensive business management systems as SAP R/3.

This practitioner's guide uses step-by-step instructions complete with a plethora of screen captures to illustrate key SAP BW functionalities. It demonstrates how SAP BW implements the fundamental star schema and solves the major challenges inherent in the creation of data warehouses: performance, reliability, and error-handling. Using a real-world business scenario as a running example, SAP® BW presents a comprehensive view of the technology, from underlying concepts and basic techniques through its most sophisticated capabilities.