Logging on and RSA overview - SAP ERP Tutorial

- [Rob] Hello, and welcome to BW310, SAP BW Enterprise Data Warehousing. My name is Rob, and I'll be your instructor throughout this course. In our first project, we're going to be loading a file of data into BW. And this is a brand new BW system, so nothing's been modeled yet, so we're starting completely from ground zero. If you'd like to follow along, we've included all the data files inside of this course for you to download and save to your computer. And if you've also followed our tutorial on creating your own SAP server environment on your laptop or desktop, you can then connect your SAP GUI to your SAP server and develop alongside. In our first, unit we're going to be looking at how you connect to the BW system and explore the primary transaction within BW which is our RSA1. So I've already opened up my SAP GUI, so this SAP log on icon you see here, and it pops up this screen, which shows you all the SAP servers that you can connect to. So feel free to add your own server if you have not yet done so. But I have two servers already pre-configured here, we have BW74, and BW73. For this training, we're going to be using BW74. And if you only have access to 73, don't worry, the bulk of the training is still relevant to your installation. Okay, so once you log in, you should be greeted with this screen. And this basically just shows you some shortcuts to your favorite items that you've saved, also jumps you to relevant transactions that you might want to be using. In all honesty, we really don't come to the screen very often other than just having it be the initial screen we pop into. So let's go to transaction code RSA1. And this is the BW Data Warehousing workbench. So in other words instead of RSA1, you can see it's a pretty unique looking screen, much different from the bulk of what SAP transactions tend to look like. So if you do have experience in SAP, ECC, FI, and some other modules, that's good, this is going to be a lot more object oriented. You'll notice the left hand pane over here, which is our Modeling pane. These are the various options that we have to toggle, which will then change this right hand view. So currently, we're looking at info providers. If we were to expand these green diamonds, which are info areas, we'd reveal our info providers. And we can see that currently the system has a multi provider type and we can see that SAP has pre-delivered a few different samples for us, but we won't really be using these for our training. We're going to be creating everything from scratch. But these are info cubes. This is an info provider, that's actually info object, but it's been assigned to be an info provider and a multi provider. And inside the multi provider, you can see that there's more cubes. And there's one other object type we're not seeing here, which is the data store object. There we go, we found one. Okay. So say we want to look at the info objects, because right now we're only seeing the info providers. All we need to do is click on the Info Objects over here. And very similar to the last screen, we have the top level info area. And then all the info objects that are a part we can see right here. So characteristics, key figures. And we'll get into all these different, what these objects mean a little later in our training, but right now I'm just giving you a brief overview of these different screens that we have access to. Info providers are our top level objects that we actually build that houses all of our data, and we then use that data to create reports. So an info provider literally provides information, stores all that data, and then we tap into that using other reporting tools like business objects, facts analyzer, and so on. Info objects can also be assigned as info providers. So if you right click on this info object here, we can see that we have the Switch Off Info Provider property, because it's currently active. but we'll leave it as is for now. And whenever you see an object inside of this pane, it's available to be used outside of BW for reporting. So we would connect a business objects installation to one of these info cubes or DSOs. Same goes for Business Explorer, we will be connecting that to one of these either multiple provider DSO, info cube, you name it. If it's showing up inside of this pane, we can pull data out of it in a report. The Info Objects pane shows us all the different info objects that had been installed in our BW system. Keep in mind, this is a brand new installation. So if you are using your employer system, or you're logged into a paid shared SAP sandbox environment, you're probably going to see a ton of different info objects scattered across here. But since this house is a brand new install, we don't have too much out here. This is where every single info object that is installed in the system is going to be and throughout this training, you'll get a much better idea of why we use info objects for development and how they fit into the overall puzzle that makes up the BW environment. Info sources, data sources and source systems, all three of these guys make up how we get data from outside of BW into BW. The source systems contain multiple data sources. So all these different folders here are different systems that we can tap into to pull data from. So if we were to click into one of these systems, we can see all the different application components in the underlying data sources. And an application component is basically a folder that contains our data sources. As you can see, there currently aren't any data sources installed. This is a brand new environment. But if we wanted to create a new one, we would just right click on an application component and choose Create Datasource. Open hub destinations allow you to write data out of BW. So say you had a requirement where you needed to FTP a CSV file somewhere, you would do that. They're not as common as the majority of the delivered info providers like cubes and DSOs, because we use those to report off of, but the open hubs do play an important role when you actually need a physical file, and not necessarily just reading a report from these objects. The planning section is used by the planning teams to forecast and match up actuals. And we have our process chains, which enable us to automate the loading process inside of BW. So once you start developing, you'll really understand intricate processes that need to happen for these loads that successfully take place. So SAP design these process chains. So process chains essentially allow you to pre-configure a series of steps. These are what are most commonly used during nightly loads. It'll begin by pulling data from the source, massaging that data, activating the data, doing some more transformation on that data, continually moving it to different targets. And this is all completely automated. If you were to do it by hand, not only would you introduce human error, but you would also not really be using your time wisely. And aside from all the other objects that we've seen, we have the Data Flow option which allows you to explore different data flows within BW. History which shows you recently tapped into objects. We have the Find option which will allow us to choose the BW object type that we want to search for, along with the technical name. And if you would like to search for a description you could do that as well. So the technical name and the description just to give you a quick overview. Right here is the tech name. There could only be one of each of these technical names. In SAP environment, you can't have another 0D_FC_C01. You can, however, have the same description twice. They give it like an object ID. And if your screen looks like this, it's not really taking advantage of the real state. Go up to the top left here, right above the Modeling bar, you'll see this little guy with a white poster behind him. Click that. Then choose Hide Navigator After Navigation. And then choose Hide Tree After Navigation. And now I'm going to reload the transaction by going to forward slash N RSA1. And the reason why I'm using a forward slash N, is because if I were to just type RSA1, it wouldn't take me anywhere. If I typed in our transaction code like SM66, it wouldn't go anywhere. You actually tell SAP, hey, I'd like a new window. So forward slash N for new RSA1. And that we runs a transaction for you. The other function is forward slash O, which allows you to open up another SAP session. So say you didn't want to lose what you're looking at on that first screen, just type forward slash O SM66. And that's going to launch the SAP Work Process monitor. And you can see we still have other session. You can go ahead and just close this one for now. And that's a brief overview of the Data Warehousing Workbench. The RSA1 transaction. Let's now take a brief look at the file we're going to be bringing into BW. So this is the beer_data CSV file. This is beer related data, so this is coming from breweries. We have the brewery, the name of the beer, the style of the beer, the ABV or alcohol by volume content, the average customer review, one to five, what do most users rate this particular beer at? We have the review number, which is the count of reviews that came in. We also have a regional rank, which indicates based on the region that this brewery is located in, what it ranks in. So the number one breweries for that region have a one. And we have our states for that associated brewery. So we have a good amount of detailed information about these breweries. And now we're going to bring this into BW, so that we can then create reports off of it. So again, this is a CSV file. And now let's move on to the next section, which is creating our info area to get this project kicked off.