Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Three Methods for Editing DataStore Object Data Without Altering Source Data

DataStore object data usually updates when the user or system generates or changes source system documents. The data flows into SAP BW via a full load or delta queue extract. Unfortunately, the real world sometimes intrudes on this ideal scenario and requires you to edit data in BW directly. Discover the pros and cons of three methods of editing data in BW.


Key Concept

A maintenance dialog is a function group and set of screens that the system can generate automatically after you create a table. You then use these screens to maintain (view, modify, insert, or delete) rows in the associated table. You generate a maintenance dialog from transaction SE11 using the Utilities(H)>Table Maintenance Generator menu navigation. After generating a maintenance dialog, you use transaction SM30 to actually display the dialog so you can use it to maintain the table.

Imagine an example scenario in which the system passes a sales order from an R/3 system to BW, and then purges it in R/3. Much later you discover that the system should have credited it to a department, profit center, or person other than what the configuration rules defined. The configuration rules may be wrong due to the business changing — such as the assignment of the account to which the sales order belongs to department X when the account really transferred to department Y — but no one updated R/3 to reflect that. Eventually, department Y may discover this and require proper credit.

In another scenario, sales representative A makes a sale but sales representative B owns the account. Sales rep A notifies his manager so the manager can override the account assignments in R/3 to give sales rep A proper credit. Only later does sales rep A discover that the override never took place so he never got credit for the sale. But now the source data no longer exists in R/3. The two scenarios have a common pattern — the user cannot update the data in the source because the data is either purged, static, frozen, or off limits to updates. This forces the problem upon the BW team. How can you update data directly in BW when the business demands it and there is no other recourse?

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