As a lead-in to today’s live chat with Dr. Bjarne Berg, I wanted to share a tip from one his upcoming BI and IT 2011 presentations. The details below, pulled from his session, What you need to know to get the most out of using SAP NetWeaver BW as your enterprise data warehouse, coincide nicely with today’s forum topic on BI/BW performance optimization.
Berg mentions that, when it comes to enterprise data warehousing, there are 10 major pitfalls every BI and IT team should be aware of. Here are three specific “gotchas” to avoid:
Pitfall #1: Lack of Reasonable
-Some examples of reasonable performance include:
- 90% of all queries run under 20 seconds
- System is available 98% of the time
- Data loads are available at 8am 99% of the time
- User support tickets are answered within 30 minutes
(first response) - User support tickets are closed within 48 hours 95% of the time
- System is never unavailable for more than 72 hrs, including upgrades, service packs, and disaster recovery
- Delta backups are done each 24-hour cycle and system backups are done every weekend
Pitfall #2: Jack-of-all-trades à Master of none …
-SAP NetWeaver BW is complex with many different tools and technologies
- Don’t rely on a single person with no specialized skills
-Make each person responsible for a focused technology or task
Pitfall #3: An army of “architects” who don’t understand SAP
-Have one “architect” — quality is more important than quantity
-Architecture is technical by nature
- PowerPoints only gets you a small part of the way
-The BW architect should know the technology better than anyone in the room and be able to design solutions
If you’re interested in learning the other 7 pitfalls to avoid while building a data warehousing strategy – or want to pick Dr. Berg’s brain on any other BW or performance-related topic, please join us in the BI/BW forum this afternoon, from 1:30-2:30. See you there!
