InfoObjects: InfoObjects are the smallest pieces in SAP BW puzzle.

They are used to describe business information and processes. Typical examples of InfoObjects are: Customer Name, Region, Currency, Revenue, Fiscal year. Key figures Key figures describe numeric information that are reported on in a query. The most popular types of key figures are: Quantity - numeric values with associated unit of measure; Amount - numeric values with associated currency; Date - enable date computation; Time - enable time computations; Number; Integer. Characteristics Characteristics describe business objects in BW like products, customers, employee, and attributes like color, material, company code. They enable us to set select criteria during which we display required data. Unit characteristics Unit characteristics provide a meaning of key figures values, stores currencies or units of measure (e.g., currency unit, value unit). Time characteristics Time characteristics describe time reference of business events. They build the time dimension obligatory part of InfoCube. The complete time characteristics (clearly assigned to a point in time) provided by SAP: calendar day (0CALDAY), calendar week (0CALWEEK), calendar month (0CALMONTH), calendar quarter (0CALQUARTER), calendar year (0CALYEAR), fiscal year (0FISCYEAR), and fiscal period (0FISCPER). Incomplete time characteristics: CALMONTH2, 0CALQUART1, 0HALFYEAR1, 0WEEKDAY1, 0FISCPER3. Technical characteristics Technical characteristics have administrative purposes (e.g., stores request ID, change ID). InfoObjects catalogs SAP BW InfoObjects are stored in InfoObjects catalogs, separately Key figures and Characteristics (all types). Usually there are two InfoObjects catalogs (for Key figures and Characteristics) defined for every business context in SAP BW implementation. Detailed information on particular InfoObject you can find in the Modeling area of the Data Warehousing Workbench (TCode: RSA1 -> Modeling -> InfoObjects). What is InfoArea? InfoAreas are used to organize InfoCubes and Info Objects. Each InfoCube is assigned to an InfoArea. Through an InfoObject Catalog, each InfoObject is assigned to an InfoArea as well. The

maximum number of characters allowed for the technical name is 30. USE OF INFOSOURCE: Infosources are mostly used in 3.x. Actually, it is still necessary if you want to keep your datasources as 3.x datasources, but then youre dealing with 3.x infosources. In BW3.5 it is mandatory to use infosource, but in BI7.0 it is optional. it is using the scenario like when you loading the data from single source to multiple targets and applying the same logic to all the targets. if you want to apply transformation more than once for a single target we go for info source. In BI 7.0, Infosources are used for joining transformations. It is a virtual structure consisting of infoobjects which help in joining transformations. In BW 7, they can be used to to structure your data flow: - making two transformations instead of one. INFOPROVIDERS: An InfoProvider is an object for which queries can be created or executed in BEx. InfoProviders are the objects or views that are relevant for reporting. InfoProviders are metaobjects in the database that can be uniformly seen as data providers within a query definition, and whose data can also be reported uniformly. The type of data retrieval, the degree of detail or "proximity" to the source system in the dataflow diagram differs from InfoProvider to InfoProvider. These differences do not affect Reporting. In Reporting, these are objects containing data that is suitable for evaluation using a BEx query. The term InfoProvider encompasses objects that physically contain data: Basic InfoCubes Transactional InfoCubes ODS Objects InfoObjects (characteristics with attributes or texts). A characteristic is thus an InfoProvider if it has master data and is assigned to an InfoArea. It must be explicitly defined as an InfoProvider in the InfoObject maintenance. On the other hand, they can also be objects that do not physically store data, but which display logical views, such as: InfoSets RemoteCubes SAP RemoteCubes Virtual InfoCube with Services MultiProviders. Generally, it can be stated that all types of InfoCubes are also InfoProviders. The following graphic gives an overview of BW objects that can be used in reporting. They are divided between pure data targets containing data and InfoProviders that only display logical views and do not contain any data. In the BEx, the system only accesses one InfoProvider. It is not important here how the data is modeled.