Building SAP BW into multi-tier architecture model in Business Services

Being implemented on top of SAP Web Application Services SAP’s BW provides a multi-tier architecture (figure shown below), along with a complete software development environment, system management tools and additional functionalities such as currency conversion or security. Although it is closely related to SAP R/3, SAP BW is a completely separate software package which comes with automated extraction and loading facilities.

Components of BW architecture

SAP BW is based on integrated metadata concept with metadata being managed by metadata services. SAP’s BW has following layers:

* Extraction, Loading and Transformation (ELT) services layer.
* Storage services layer, with services for storing and archiving information.
* Analysis and access services layer, which provides access to the information stored in SAP BW.
* Presentation services layer, which offers different options for presenting information to end users.
* Administration services.
* Metadata services.

Figure: Multi-tier Architectural Pattern