Being implemented on top of SAP Web Application Services
SAP’s BW provides a multi-tier architecture (figure shown below), along with a
complete software development environment, system management tools and
additional functionalities such as currency conversion or security. Although it
is closely related to SAP R/3, SAP BW is a completely separate software package
which comes with automated extraction and loading facilities.
SAP BW is based on integrated metadata concept with
metadata being managed by metadata services. SAP’s BW has following layers:
- Extraction, Loading and Transformation (ELT) services layer.
- Storage services layer, with services for storing and archiving
information.
-
Analysis and access services layer, which provides access
to the information stored in SAP BW.
-
Presentation services layer, which offers different
options for presenting information to end users.
- Administration services.
- Metadata services.