What is the difference between SAP BW and SAP Data Warehouse Cloud?

After the first couple of weeks of testing the BETA-version of SAP Data Warehouse Cloud we got a first impression of what the differences between SAP BW and the SAP Data Warehouse Cloud are and how they will differentiate in the future.

The most obvious initial difference is of course the way you set up a new instance. As usual for a cloud system, there is no installation needed, you can access all functionalities with a browser-based UI and setting it up is essentially ordering a system, logging and then start building data models. Compute and Storage can be added dynamically as needed and updates will be automatically applied in regular intervals similar to other SAP Cloud products.

As of now with SAP Data Warehouse Cloud you can consume and integrate data from other systems faster than with BW approaches, even though the connection options are limited in the Beta, they are quick to set up and allow you to ingest data quickly. An additional advantage is that there is no need to replicate the data into your SAP Data Warehouse Cloud environment when you connect to HANA-based data sources including SAP BW on HANA or SAP BW/4HANA systems, as you can take full advantage of the VDM capabilities.

On the flipside, within SAP Data Warehouse Cloud the transformation capabilities are currently quite limited compared to SAP BW for now. You can use standard SQL commands to perform Select statements, Unions and Joins on your datasets and more advanced SQL expressions on hand to perform cleansing activities. But it does not yet compare to the mature and advanced  data modeling capacities of an SAP BW system.

SAP is aware of that, however and we got information from SAP that the data modeling capabilities will be extended and we are keen to see how SAP Data Warehouse Cloud will develop in this area. SAP provided a statement concerning data modelling within SAP Data Warehouse Cloud which gives us an idea where they are intending to move to:

“SAP Data Warehouse […] includes the ABAP Platform Cloud as an additional engine for advanced data warehouse processing like request management, delta load capabilities, master data management, and others, which are known from SAP BW/4. This means that the SAP BW best practices will be reviewed and adapted to SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, leveraging cloud capabilities in order to provide the best experience to solve user challenges.”

“The envisioned extension modeling approach is to create a new view in SAP Data Warehouse Cloud that includes the SAP BW/4 CompositeProvider as one source and then add data to it and consume it via SAP Data Warehouse Cloud.”

Some exciting capabilities where we saw early glimpses and developments will be all the capabilities to allow business users to help them unlock data modeling capabilities. The spaces concept is a very central and very powerful capability that will allow you to give users dedicated areas to do their own data modeling, while also protecting your established data models and encapsulating them so you can control them. You can then combine spaces and build data models across those combined spaces to unify them. We have just started to explore the spaces concept and how to work with them together and are excited to see what additional features they will get. 

The KPI Builder and Business Catalog are also new concepts to enable business users to work with their data and would give them the tools to see and define KPI and data model definitions and trace their lineage down to the data sources to ensure data quality and help build confidence and consensus on the data. All of those are also in early development, though.

We will continue testing especially to see how to complete End-to-end process and modeling flow will look like and how these concepts will work together, but there are some intriguing possibilities there.