SAP BusinessObjects BI4 on SAP HANA

Editorial note: this blog has been updated.  I hope you’ll still review and understand that my point of view hasn’t actually changed at the end, but the content is important for you to understand. Thierry’s comment clarified my misunderstanding from my prior conversations with SAP.  Here goes… I hope you know me by know. SAP […]

SAP Updates Minimum Hardware Requirements for BI4

SAP has quietly updated the minimum hardware requirements for SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence 4.0 as part of the release of Support Pack 5 (SP5). Here are the minimum hardware requirements from the Support Pack 4 Product Availability Matrix (PAM): And here are the minimum hardware requirements from the Support Pack 5 Product Availability Matrix (PAM): […]

Fun with the BI4 Upgrade Management Tool

One of the first things you will discover when migrating from XI3.1 to BI4 is that the Import Wizard (IW) is gone (and there was much rejoicing), and it has been replaced by the Upgrade Management Tool (UMT). This is excellent news, since the UMT is a bit easier to use. However, there are a few things that are helpful to know to make your migrations go more smoothly.

Demolition Derby, Part 1: Derby, maybe?

If you’ve been following the developments in the BI4 world over the last year, then you’ve undoubtedly noticed the long-awaited and much needed addition of the Monitoring engine. For years I used to jibe SAP about how BOBJ was really designed as a stand-alone, small use application. BI4 is the first major step towards a truly “enterprise” application. The monitoring engine is some good evidence of this. Where system administrators used to be blind to internal operations of BI platform, we now have unprecedented visibility.

Auditing SAP Dashboards in BI4

If you have been following me in the community enough you know I’m a system statistics nerd. I love Auditor. I wrote Sherlock with my buddies because I love system statistics. And, with the release of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence 4.0 (BI4), we have new stuff to audit!

Working with a customer rolling out SAP BusinessObjects for the first time, we (shockingly) were experiencing performance nightmares with SAP Dashboards. You don’t want dashboards that load in more than a handful of seconds. Many of you may scoff that this is impossible, but I’ll argue any day that a dashboard shouldn’t take 30 seconds to load. Yet, this is not the purpose of this post. Let’s talk about auditing dashboards.