Wednesday 25 April 2018

SAP BI/BW Interview Questions

1) What is SAP BW/BI? What is the purpose of SAP BW/BI?

SAP BW/BI stands for Business Information Warehouse, also known as business intelligence. For any business, data reporting, analyses and interpretation of business data is very crucial for running business smoothly and making decision. SAP BW/BI manage the data and enables to react quickly and in line with the market. It enables the user to analyze data from operative SAP applications as well as from other business.

2) In SAP BW/BI what are the main areas and activities?

a) Data Warehouse: Integrating, collecting and managing entire company's data.
b) Analyzing and Planning: Using the data stored in data warehouse
c) Reporting: BI provides the tools for reporting in web-browser, Excel etc.
d) Broad cast publishing: To send the information to the employees using email, fax etc.
e) Performance: Performance of the company
f) Security: Securing the access like using SAP logon tickets from portal

3) What is data Integrity?

Data integrity is to eliminate duplicate entries in the database.

4) What is table partition?

Table partition is done to manage the huge data to improve the efficiency of the applications. The partition is based on 0CALMONTH and 0FISCPER. There are two type of partitioning that is done
a) Database partitioning
b) Logical partitioning

5) What is data flow in BW/BI?

Data flows from a transactional system to the analytical system (BW). DS ( Data Service) on the transactional system needs to be replicated on BW side and attached to infosource and update rules respectively.

6) What is ODS (Operational Data Store)?

'Operational Data Store' or 'ODS' is used for detailed storage of data. It is a BW architectural component that appears between PSA ( Persistent Staging Area) and infocubes, it allows BEX (Business Explorer) reporting. It is primarily used for detail reporting rather than dimensional analysis, and it is not based on the star schema. ODS (Operational Data Store) objects do not aggregate data as infocubes do. To load the data into an IDS object, new records are inserted, existing records are updated, or old records are deleted as specified by RECORDMODE value.

7) What is an 'Infocube'?

'Infocube' is structured as the star schema and it is a data storage area. To create an infocube, you require 1 'fact table' surrounded by 4 dimensions. The 'fact table' is surrounded by different dim table, which are linked with DIM' ids. And as per the data, you will have aggregated data in the cubes.

8) How many tables does info cube contain?

Info cubes contain two tables, Fact table and Dimensions table.

9) Mention what are the maximum number of dimensions in info cubes?

In info cubes, there are 16 dimensions ( 3 sap defined and 1 customer defined)

10) What is the difference between ODS and Info-cubes?

The difference between ODS and Info-cubes are
a) ODS has a key while Info-cubes does not have any key
b) ODS contains detailed level data while Info-cube contains refined data
c) Info-cube follows Star Schema (16 dimensions) while ODS is a flat file structure
d) There can be two or more ODS under a cube, so cube can contain combined data or data that is derived from other fields in the ODS

11) What is the dimension in BW? How would you optimize the dimensions?

A dimension in BW is a collection of reference information about a measurable event in data warehousing. In this context, events are known as "facts". For example, a customer dimension's attributes could include first and last name, gender, birth date etc. To optimize the dimensions, do not add most dynamic characteristics into the same dimension and make the dimension smaller. Also, define as many dimensions as possible, and the dimension should not exceed 20% of the fact table size.

12) What are info objects?

Characteristics and key figures will be called as info objects. 'Info-objects' are similar to fields of the source system, data based on which we organize data in different info provider in BW.

13) What is modelling?

Designing of data base is done by using modelling. The design of DB (Data Base) depends on the schema, and schema is defined as the representation of tables and their relationship.

14) What is extended star schema?

Star Schema comprises of Fact tables and Dimension Tables, while the table that consists the Master data are kept in separate tables. These separate tables for Master data are referred as Extended Star Schema.

15) What are the extractors and mention their types?

To extract data from the system program is used which is known as Extractor. The types of extractors in BW are:
a) Application Specific: BW content FI, HR, CO, SAP CRM, LO cockpit
b) Customer-Generated Extractors: LIS, FI-SL, CO-PA
c) Cross Application (Generic Extractors) : DB View,Infoset, Function Module

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