ODP, ODQ and SLT in SAP BW 7.4

Introduction

Data can be extracted from SAP and non SAP source systems using ODP in SAP BW 7.4. You can create a source system of type ODP. BI content also has datasources that can use ODP to extract data.

There are different types of source systems related to ODP as seen in the figure below-

The delta records are in ODQ which resides in SLT server. The trigger based SLT mechanism makes it possible to extract the data real time or in a scheduled way from SAP or non-SAP sources.Thus, along with RSA7, we have a new mechanism for monitoring delta queues which is ODQ. ODQ has however many advantages over the RSA7 mechanism.

Steps to Use ODP Datasource

Create a source system under ODP-BW or ODP-SAP (Extractors). Ask your Basis team to configure the source system connection settings.

Check you source system connection. Now right click on it and select display datasource tree.

Create an application component and then create a datasource.Since, I am creating a datasource in the self BW system, I can select any Infoprovider as an Operational Data Provider.

Note: If your source system is ODP_SAP, you can select a standard datasource by specifying application component hierarchy or directly replicate an existing datasource.

Select a provider which can be any infoprovider. The semantics indicate its type, e.g. F stands for Facts, P for attributes, Q for time dependent attributes, T for text and H for hierarchy.

I have selected 0IC_C03 as the object to be extracted.

Other fields are filled by the system. Continue to create the datasource. Give a description of the datasource.

Notice the ‘Adapter’ field in the ‘Extraction’ tab of the datasource.

Keep other settings as it is and activate the datasource.Continue with the warnings.

One of the benefits of ODP is you can skip loading the data to the PSA. When you right click on your datasource, notice that there is an option to create a DTP. Infopackage is optional here.

Since we haven’t defined a transformation, let us first create one. Click on ‘Create Transformation’ from the context menu.Select a target and continue. Activate it.

Now create a DTP. Notice that you can select to initialize the load, and also select to load data directly from source skipping the PSA.

If you don’t want to load historical data, you can check the flag ‘Delta init without data’

Activate the DTP and execute it. No records are fetched as I selected the flag ‘Delta init without Data’. However, executing the DTP activated the delta queue. Go to the tcode ODQMON in the source system, here it is the same BW system.

We can see that the queue is active. You can subsequently execute the Delta DTP which extracts only the newly created records from the source. If the DTP is successful, the queue will also show as 1 request-extraction successful.

Benefits of ODQ / ODP

• ODQ allows a common monitor to view the extractions by multiple users.
• ODQMON and RSA7, both the mechanism can be used, however ODQ has more advantages
• In ODQ, delta can be viewed according to various filters like provider, subscriber type etc.
• More details of the delta fetched can be seen in the ODQ like number of units, number of records, size, compression factor and so on.
• In ODQ, data is stored in compressed format and also there is no need to store the data in the PSA.

Depending on the data, the compression factor may vary. Click on the ‘units’ button to see the number of rows and compression factor-

• Single queue in ODQ can be used by many BW subscribers
• Retention period can be maintained
• You can also monitor real time data acquisition requests here
• Based on the queue subscriber, there is one time data extraction which can be loaded to multiple targets
• There is also timestamp based recovery mechanism for ODQ
• Instead of SAP systems as source, the datasource can also be a web service where SLT server replicates the data and puts it into ODQ, which can then be extracted via DTP.

Please note: Right now, as per SAP BW 7.4 version, only datasources based on simple tables/views containing minimal extractor logic are supported by SLT.