Google Trend on SAP HANA, BW and BI

Out of curiosity and as a conversation teaser, I did a Google trend search on SAP HANA, BW and BI.

As you can see SAP BW is the first term to appear on the graph, since February 2004, I guess that the default in the graph is to show the last ten years. Once the term SAP BI starts ramping up around 2005, the term BW starts to decline, I could guess as a substitution of one term by the other. It’s always funny how SAP manages to replace one term with another just for marketing purposes without any real substantial or dramatic change on the product or platform (remember PSA was originally called ODS, or the change from ODS to DSO).

There is a point in which both terms SAP BI and BW have a very similar count, so a replacement or substitution did not happen, rather the terms seem to be used interchangeably. If you do a search on Wikipedia, you will find there is no specific entry for SAP BI but there are for BW and SAP Netweaver Business Warehouse. What I get from my personal experience is that people call now BI to what used to be called BW.

In September 2010, the term SAP HANA starts to show up and ramps up fast and it is around May 2013 that HANA surpasses BI and BW.

As SAP HANA is currently used across all type of solution offerings in SAP, not only data warehousing, it is easy to infer that the term has a bigger scope or audience than the data warehousing ones. The question is, once I have for example, my ERP system running in HANA, do I really need an SAP BI (or BW) system in place?

Another interesting trend is the one related to jobs, below.

In this case the job search for SAP HANA has not yet surpassed the combined job search for SAP BI or SAP BW.

This is just a conversation teaser, it does not intend in any way to be of statistical value or “scientific” study. It only shows trends on what people search, not on the real weight on jobs on the market.

How to set up the Process Chain Execution User

Even when the start process job scheduling in a process chain shows the name of the user that scheduled it, the user that executes the process chain is generally ALEREMOTE or whatever name is given to the batch job processing user.

To check which user is set up for a specific process chain, display it / or modify it in transactions RSPC or RSPC1, and execute the menu path Process Chain → Attributes → Execution User.

Process Chain Execution User

You can then select between using the BW Background User, the current user or a specific Special User.

Selection of User for execution

This information is then stored in table RSPCCHAINATTR field BATCHUSER: if empty, it will use the BW Background User, if the value is %%actual%%, it means it will run under the current user, if it set to any other value, it will run under that specific user.