The Lost comparison!

Data warehousing(D/W) isn’t genetic science, but at the same time, don’t even imagine to become an guru in ten minutes. If you’re a object-oriented person, you may find it takes time to get used to the way D/W is done. Succinctness is what I like about it very much. For instance, in case of Java or ASP.NET, to display display a report, you have to type out ample amount of code and make few clicks(Even in .NET 3.5 F/W where they claim to have totally converted the coding to xml format it takes 5 minutes of time with few lines of code written), its very simple in the case of D/W.

This may not look like a big difference, but the extra typing gets very deadening over a long pieces of code. D/W also makes it easy to recognize variables, because they always begin with Z, 0, etc(different for different tools). Most of the controls in the workbench have very intuitive images. Even when the images look strange at first sight, you can often work out what they are. Don’t worry if you don’t know what controls are and what are they used for: they’re all explained in SAP BW help and OWB help, along with the other main things you need to know about the basics of workbench. BTW, workbench is the main tool for tasks in the data warehousing process.

Perhaps the biggest shock to newcomers is that D/W is far less tolerant of mistakes than any other coding format. If you make a small mistake in HTML, ASP.NET or JAVA, most browsers will still render the page. If you miss out any of the procedure in D/W, you’ll get an uncompromising error message. It’s why you need to have a reasonable understanding of D/W and basic querying before embarking on creating a report. If the underlying Report of your D/W tool is shaky to start with, your learning curve with D/W will be considerably steeper.