Many BI implementations have a requirement for Operational reporting in BW. That requirement can be addressed by the frequent data loading to BW in many cases.

However some business processes require real time data availability. Here are just few examples:

• Logistics: A Warehouse Coordinator would like to see orders ready for picking & delivery in order to be able to schedule warehouse and transport activities in efficient way.
• Order Status: Customers would like to track the statuses of their orders on-line.
• Finance: Period and Year Closure is a good example too. Budget holders always want to see immediately how accruals/adjustments influence overall FI picture.
• Information: It might be also interesting to have some kind of News board powered by BW.

Up until now this has been a big headache in BW. However there is some really promising new real time reporting functionality delivered in NW2004s, called Real Time Data Acquisition (RDA). This functionality is designed to bring data into BW Data Targets on a near real time basis.

Together with Direct Data Access, RDA enables Operational reporting in NW2004s.

Before NW2004s, only direct pull functionality was available and this had a number of disadvantages:

• Resource consumption at Source system
• All calculations are at the time of reporting and this often means slow reporting

Now there is Real Time Data Acquisition (Push), which brings data into BW as soon as it appears in source system. There are two options for RDA:

• Web Service pushes data into PSA from External system (e.g. CRM)
• BW Daemon pulls data out of SAP system delta queue to BW DSO via PSA

Real Time Data Acquisition functionality has following benefits

• Minimal pressure on the source system
• Separation of reporting from transformation and extraction

Although the SAP documentation is pretty comprehensive, I would like to share my own experience of setting up the RDA functionality.

First of all, I would like to mention that RDA for SAP source systems works differently from RDA for non SAP sources. In Figure 1 you can see it is still effectively a pull mechanism for both scenarios, therefore this is actually Near Real Time reporting.

Figure 1