The administration services in SAP BW can be availed through Administration Workbench (AWB). It is a single point of entry for data warehouse development, administration and maintenance tasks in SAP BW with Metadata modeling component, scheduler and monitor as its main components as described in the figure hereunder:
Figure: Metadata Services Architecture
Metadata modeling: Metadata modeling component is the main entry point for defining the core metadata objects used to support reporting and analysis. This includes everything from defining the extraction process and implementing transformations to defining flat or multidimensional objects for storage of information.
Modeling Features
Metadata modeling provides a Metadata Repository where all the metadata is stored and a Metadata Manager that handles all the requests for retrieving, adding, changing, or deleting metadata.
Reporting and scheduling mechanism: Reporting and scheduling are the processes required for the smooth functioning of SAP BW. The various batch processes in the SAP BW need to be planned to provide timely results, avoid resource conflicts by running too many jobs at a time and to take care of logical dependencies between different jobs. These processes are controlled in the scheduler component of AWB. This is achieved by either scheduling single processes independently or defining process chains for complex network of jobs required to update the information available in the SAP BW system. Reporting Agent controls execution of queries in a batch mode to print reports, identify exception conditions and notify users and pre compute results for web templates.
Administering ETL service layer in multi- tier level: SAP�s ETL service layer provides services for data extraction, data transformation and loading of data. It also serves as the staging area for intermediate data storage for quality assurance purposes. The extraction technology of SAP BW is supported by database management systems of mySAP technology and does not allow extraction from other database systems like IBM, IMS and Sybase. It does not support dBase, MS Access and MS Excel file formats. However, it provides all the functionality required for loading data from non- SAP systems as the ETL services layer provide open interfaces for loading non-SAP data.
