SAP Open Information Warehouse 

The SAP Open Information Warehouse (OIW) unifies the various information systems of the R/3 System into a single system. You can use the OIW to gain an overview of the various information units (" Info Objects") in the R/3 System and to combine particularly relevant information units into queries.

The OIW obtains the answers to queries without requiring you to understand the access paths involved in the R/3 System. To use the OIW for data retrieval, you do not need any knowledge of the tables, programs, reports or information systems, etc., that are held in the system. These structures only show up as meta data (i.e. data about data) in the OIW Catalog.

The OIW Catalog defines which data the OIW can retrieve along which access paths. The customer can individually change the contents of the OIW Catalog when customizing the Open Information Warehouse. As a general rule, the OIW does not maintain its own data stores. It only holds links to certain data sources in the R/3 information systems.

The OIW is "open" in that it contains a programming interface for connecting to arbitrary external applications. The OIW Frontend for Microsoft Excel is based on this programming interface. This special OIW Frontend uses the so-called Add-in capability of Microsoft Excel. You can use the user interface elements of the OIW Frontend to construct queries in the OIW and to embed these in Microsoft Excel worksheets.

The programming interface of the OIW is, according to the general rules for SAP Business APIs, established in the Business Object Repository (BOR). It consists of only two, very general functions:

• "Read the OIW Catalog" and
• "Run an OIW query".