SAP BW 7.4Practical Guide Hardcover – 30 April 2015

One fine day I received a message that I was being assigned to a customer for an ABAP project. I tried getting the details of the sort of work, but the fulfilment Manager was reluctant to share.Once in front of the customer I realized that this was a SAP BW day to day operations support.I had NEVER seen a SAP BW screen before in my life. I understood the fulfilment Managers business accumanship, as he was worried that I might reject the assignment.I had to spend the initial few days trying to find the right approver for my roles. Once into SAP BW, It was like reading Chinese.My previous customer was a kind hearted and generous one with budget to sponsor a decent amount of SAP Press books.But this customer and my own project Delivery managers were too new. So my only option was to spend cash from my own pocket to get this book.The book starts in a good note and Author discusses everything from logging on to navigating. Author also explains the relevance of ALPHA in conversion routine which even Technical books have not.Chapters 4 to 6 give a lot of details including minute ones for creating the various Infoobjects and building blocks of SAP BW. Program RSMIGRHANADB mentioned by the authors in chapter 5 to convert was not available in our 730 BW System.I was getting a pop up with radiobuttons between figure 6.19 and figure 6.20. I went with the default radiobutton which SAP selected.This pop up was about Display as network or tree. I thought the authors skipped this topic, but down the line they have explained in figures 6.29 and 6.30. Not sure why the author has forgotten icon 4 in figure 6.41I was impatient to jump to chapter 7, so went through chapters 4 to Chapter 6 very quickly without doing any hands on as I have already been assigned to a support project. However these chapters are necessary to understand the various terms and objects of SAP BW, Which differ from SAP ERP.My meat was from Chapter 7 onwards as the objects have already been created.In chapter 8 Author is confusing by switching between SAP ERP and SAP BI without mentioning details. I had to enter the tcode in both systems to determine which is which.The ABAP code in listing 9.1 starts off with no head and ends with no tail. i,e just some piece of code has been copied and pasted here. You need an ABAPer here. while discussing key figure properties conversion tab, Author has conviniently forgotten tcode RSCUR. I had to swet this out with my development team. However I loved this chapter the most because it filled my appetite for coding while creating the query.Chapter 10 and Chapter 11 were only a routine go through as I did not have a developer key. In the topic Miscellaneous web items, Author has jumbled all the items while describing their functionality. However this does not affect the explanations.In chapter 14 on the topic of DSO Admin and maintenance, The Logs icon in contents tabl gives a popup, But nothing is discussed on this or the selecting Delete icon. In the requests tab also, nothing is explained about the Selection and Subsequent Proc. buttons. In the reconstruction tab, none of the functionalties are discussed. There are no technical details on the functionality of the tab Reconstruction in Infocube administration and maintenance. I had to swet this out with the development team. The topic performance improvement tasks is a copy paste from DSO.I was shocked when author had dedicated only a small subtopic for process chain. The reason was on a daily basis, one of my regular jobs was to monitor the process chain. But again author has confirmed that these are just automation of regular tasks. Author has asked us to execute tcode SA37 to run program SAP_INFOCUBE_DESIGNs. This must be Tcode SE38 or SA38.Chapter 12, 13 and 15 were not of much interest to me. Still I just went through the pages to kill time, as we didn t have any of these in our BW System.Need the first few chapters only if you are developing from scratch. In my case some expert developer has already completed thestuff and I was just supposed to check the inflow of data from sources and outflow to queries. I was interested in analyzing theend to end cycle, i,e pulling data from source to displaying data in Queries.So went through chapters 3 to 6 generally and just compared the contents with the actual BW screens. Concentrated from chapter 7 onwards which revealed many secrets which the handover team hid from me.Nothing is discussed about data received via IDoCsIf you are like me and don't like typing, the data files can be downloaded from the link given by the author. The downloads haveall the data necessary for generating the test cases.One drawback is the hardcopy of the book is quite thick and I had to carry this daily to read in the train. Also the screenshots were printed in black and white.After a(n) once over, I was able to precisely locate the chapters of interest to me.Some of my screens were different as we were still in version 7.3Highlights are very well researched example with all sorts of permutations and combinations. They are quite logical and clear with real project scenario. A lesson for other SAP Press authors