Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Optimized InfoCubes are assigned a logical index and are maintained in a column store of
the HANA database. Any InfoCubes that were stored in an SAP BW Accelerator (BWA)
system will be set to inactive as part of the conversion. They will need to be reactivated
and loaded with data before they are used for reporting.
Do InfoCubes have a future?
While the future of InfoCubes is in some doubt, as can be seen in the
spirited debates in online forums and blogs, they are still needed in
SAP BW on HANA. Transactional InfoCubes play a key role in in-
tegrated planning and write-back options, as well as for storage and
management of non-cumulative key figures. They are also needed
because customers need them to avoid having to rewrite application logic, MultiPro-
viders, data transformations, and queries that were built in previous versions of SAP
BW. Moving forward, InfoCubes will likely fall out of use in new development, as
SAP HANA renders the need for relational databases, and the complicated structure
of InfoCubes, unnecessary.
3.2.2
Transitioning to the LSA++ architecture
We discussed LSA++ in
Section 2.1.2
of this topic, so we will not cover the benefits of
LSA++ in detail here. Just be aware that the new architecture takes advantage of the speed
of HANA to render the splitting up of tables and data staging of the older LSA architecture
unnecessary. The old architecture will still work, but the level of effort your company is
willing to exert should depend on how quickly the migration must be completed and the
number of personnel that are available to help in the landscape optimization.
3.2.3
ABAP code optimization
Without optimization, some single record lookups in data transformations may run more
slowly while loading data into SAP BW on HANA. You are not required to optimize the
code for these transformations, but SAP has realized that it is most likely a good idea to
do so. To help identify transformations with suboptimal coding, SAP provides the ABAP
Routine Analyzer program as part of the SAP BW Migration Cockpit for SAP HANA. This
