Operational Data Provisioning

Operational Data Provisioning provides a technical infrastructure that you can use to support two different application scenarios. The first of these is Operational Analytics for decision making in operative business processes. The other is data extraction and replication.

• Operational Analytics

  You can use Operational Analytics to perform OLAP analyses on the application data locally in the application system. For Operational Analytics, you only need to perform minimal configuration of the BW in your application system and do not need to set up a Data Warehouse. Replication of the data to a BW system is not necessary. The application data can be accessed directly. The analysis performance can be improved by using SAP HANA or SAP BW Accelerator.

• Data Extraction and Replication

  As well as indexing data in SAP HANA or SAP BW Accelerator, operational data provisioning can be used to provide data for other external consumers such as SAP BusinessObjects Data Services. Delta mechanisms are also supported here.

The data sources from the application are modeled in a joint modeling environment for search analysis purposed using the concept for search and Operational Analytics and are linked with one another. Search and analysis models are defined for this purpose. In a search and analysis model, the properties required for the analysis are set by defining an operational data provider (ODP). The ODP is the basis for replication and for the OLAP analysis. An InfoProvider is derived from an ODP and the ODPs associated with it. You can define and run analytic queries for these "TransientProviders". DataSources are particularly relevant as data sources for analysis, but other data sources from the application can also be used for operational data provisioning. Operational Data Provisioning supports search and analysis models for transaction data and master data (attributes, texts, hierarchies). SAP delivers search and analysis models that provide you with extensive Business Content for various business applications. An enhancement concept allows customer-specific enhancements for DataSource-based models. For customer-specific data sources, you can create customer-specific ODPs and search and analysis models.