Best Practices for SAP BI using DB2 9 for z/OS - IBM Redbooks

Chapter 5. Best practices for PSA
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One of the main areas of responsibility for the SAP BI system administrator is the
loading of new data into the BI system. This is normally a scheduled overnight
process that is managed by one or more process chains. The data usually must
be available for reporting in the BI system by a certain time each morning. To
ensure consistent service levels, the data load process must run efficiently.
In this chapter we discuss the best practices for optimizing the BI data load
performance for PSA on DB2 for z/OS.
There are no changes in respect of DB2 9. However, with BI 7.0 (formerly called
SAP Netweaver 2004s BI) SAP introduced a new concept for loading data into
InfoProviders. BI 7.0 already creates a PSA table when a data source is created.
The InfoPackage is then only used to load the data from the source system into
PSA. The load of the data from PSA into InfoProviders is done in an additional
step, the so-called data transfer process (DTP). So the DTP can be seen like an
additional kind of InfoPackage. With this newly introduced DTP the user has
more flexibility and transparency of the data staging process. A further goal was
to obtain better performance when loading data in parallel. The new DTP uses
something called transformations to change the data as needed.
The loading into PSA has not changed with BI 7.0 and there is no relevant
change in respect to the load performance against the former BI release.
The most relevant change is that you always get a PSA with the new DTP.
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