Mastering the SAP Business Information Warehouse: Leveraging the Business Intelligence Capabilities of SAP NetWeaver, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER 12Performance Planning and Management

Performance is one of the key success factors of every IT system or application. It requires careful planning and constant attention, even more so for data warehouse systems and reporting and analysis applications. In contrast to operational environments, data warehouse administrators are confronted with large or very large amounts of data that must be handled, as well as a discontinuous, unpredictable user behavior.

For a data warehouse project to be successful, performance considerations have to be part of every single project phase, from requirements analysis (via design, implementation, and testing) to deployment and finally when administering and maintaining the deployed applications. This chapter looks at performance as a two-step process: performance planning and performance management.

Performance planning is part of the system-development process and involves critical reviews of the requirements and the chosen information models from a performance point of view. This includes designing an appropriate information flow and corresponding system landscape; implementing efficient transformations; defining highly parallel data-load and data maintenance process chains; and, finally, managing user expectations. Performance planning lays the foundation for the overall system performance; correcting mistakes made in performance planning can be very expensive and may involve redesigning parts of the application. In particular, managing ...