For the purposes of this article, I will deal with Real Time Data Acquisition by means of S-API only.

In terms of pre-requisites, it is very important to have the correct patch levels for both NW2004s and source SAP systems. NW2004s SP12 is required to get the RDA Daemon (see diagram above) working. If you are on SP11, then OSS Note 1003818 is vital. As for the SAP source system, with PI Basis 2005.1 or 2006.1, then OSS Note 975561 is required to get real-time enabled Data Sources working properly. Regeneration of the Data Source is required after that. You should always check the correction instructions of OSS note 975561, even if SNOTE says that the note is not required as I have had to implement these corrections manually a couple of times.

Once systems are updated to the correct patch level, there are just 9 steps to get RDA working.
 
Step 1. An RDA process starts with a Data Source, like any other BW data flow. I first created a delta enabled Generic Data Source on top of a database table (Figure 1). As you can see, there is special setting to make it Real-Time enabled.

Step 2. The Data Source wast then mapped to a standard DSO in the same way as any other one.

Step 3. A standard InfoPackage and Standard DTP were created.

Step 4. An initialisation run was performed as for a normal data load. (Figure 2)

Figure 2

Figure 3

Figure 4