CALEO Blog

SAP BW on HANA - Controlled request activation

Written by Tim Bremer | May 19, 2025 9:58:55 AM

The classic approach - SAP BW with SAP Business Warehouse Accelerator

For companies that report their financial data via an SAP Business Warehouse (BW), there was a classic setup for years and before SAP BW on HANA or SAP BW/4HANA: The SAP Business Warehouse for centralizing data storage was supported by an SAP Business Warehouse Accelerator (BWA) to optimize reporting performance. This approach has the advantage that data from different data transfer processes or requests can be made available for reporting at the same time by updating the corresponding index in the BWA. Various requirements can be implemented with this so-called roll-up of requests: If, for example, figures should only be published synchronously at a certain time or after further loading processes have been completed, the delayed, simultaneous roll-up of the requests was the solution in SAP BW with BWA.

Everything new with SAP BW on HANA and SAP BW/4HANA

The possibilities of an "in-memory database" provided by SAP HANA lead to major performance gains and simplified administration in all areas of SAP BW. It is also no longer necessary to roll up the requests. However, this increase in runtime and performance under SAP HANA means that the widely used control of request activation via roll-up is no longer necessary. By default, a new request is always immediately available for reporting. However, if you now want to load from various sources and only release the entire screen for reporting once all loading processes have been completed, this is no longer possible in the standard system.

Setting the status manually

The first solution is to take status management under SAP BW on HANA or SAP BW/4HANA into your own hands. Each DTP can be switched between automatic and manual status management. The setting we want to use is "Set status manually". This initially means that the corresponding request does not turn "green", but remains "yellow" despite completion of the DTP and is therefore not shown in reporting.

In most cases, however, it will not be desirable to actually activate the request manually. Fortunately, there is a process type in SAP BW that can be used to subsequently set a request in a process chain to "green". The above requirement would therefore be solved.

However, there is another pitfall: if the required process flow does not make it possible to activate the request within the same chain, this process type no longer works. One reason for this could be, for example, the multiple execution of a DTP.

General solution - Activation via class CL_RSBK_REQUEST

We would therefore like to free ourselves from the restrictions of the SAP BW standard process type in order to achieve a request activation under SAP HANA analogous to a "roll-up" under the SAP BW Accelerator. We can use the SAP class CL_RSBK_REQUEST for this purpose. Its GET_USTATE and SET_USTATE_GREEN methods can be used to query the status of a DTP and set it to green. Using an ABAP program based on this class, manual request activation under SAP BW on HANA and SAP BW/4HANA is now possible at any time as before. As with the "roll-up" with the SAP BW Accelerator, it is important to note that holding back individual requests means that all subsequent requests will also be held back. In this respect, this type of approach should only be used where overarching data consistency or data release is required.

If you have more detailed questions or further interest in solutions with SAP BW/4HANA or SAP BW on HANA, simply contact us using the contact form.

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