The world is changing at an ever-faster rate, with economies shrinking, adapting and growing, all at slightly different times. As that happens, now more than ever, companies need accurate analytics, but they also need flexibility in what they report on and how. If you’re focused on developing and supporting the SAP BW systems which provide analytics for key management decision makers, you’re likely being asked to do more, more quickly, and without incurring net increased costs. Hardware may be limited, and planned hardware upgrades may be deferred.
Continuing in smaller test systems
With System Builder and Client Sync, part of the Data Sync Manager (DSM) suite, you can create much smaller test systems, meaning that as the production disk space increases at a steady rate the test systems need not. Infocubes, DSOs etc with a time characteristic are automatically sliced to only take the last x years/months of data. Test systems can also be refreshed independently of their source systems (ERP, SRM) etc and still take deltas from their test counterparts.
Masking sensitive data
Both in-place in existing systems, or as part of a client sync, you can remove sensitive data and replace it with random, realistic-looking values. Content for the common tables like 0CUSTOMER and 0VENDOR is delivered with the ability to run a discovery tool to find other places in which the same data is duplicated in generated objects.
Data-on-demand
Perhaps the most powerful facet right now is the Object Sync solution which allows granular selections on any Characteristic of a cube, dso etc. , to create an extract file which can then be loaded into a test or development system via a proprietary file load format, far quicker than the standard one. In addition, users can copy supporting definitions of many components. This means production BW can be a flexible source for test and development BW systems without needing to change and transport the standard extractor.
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