3 posts tagged with "SAP BW"

In Part 1 we extracted a BW system's metadata into a single DuckDB file with erpl-adt catalog sync — 53 cubes, 226 queries, every characteristic and key figure, all the lineage between them. Browsable, searchable, and completely decoupled from SAP.

Now we do the interesting thing. We unplug.

No SAP credentials in this post. No VPN, no connection, no --host. Just catalog.duckdb — the file from Part 1 — and an AI agent. The goal: take one cube (0D_NW_C01, "Actual for NW Demo") and its flagship query (0D_FC_NW_C01_Q0008, "YTD Sales by Sales Org") and reverse-engineer them into runnable dbt models on DuckDB. Reconstruct the star schema, the measures, and the year-to-date logic — from metadata alone, offline.

Here is exactly how it went.

You inherit a BW system the way you inherit an old house: with the previous owner already gone and no manual in the drawer. There is a cube called 0D_NW_C01. There is a query called 0D_FC_NW_C01_Q0008. Somebody, once, knew exactly what each of them meant. That person left, and the knowledge left with them.

This is one of the quiet costs of enterprise data work: the metadata is in SAP, but it isn't easy to carry with you. To see what a cube contains you open the Data Warehousing Workbench. To read a query definition you open the Query Designer. To trace where a number comes from you open transaction after transaction, screenshotting as you go, because there is no other place to keep the answer.

I wanted that metadata in a file I could keep: cubes, queries, InfoObjects, characteristics, key figures, CDS views, and the links between them — something I could reason about without SAP in the loop.

That is what the erpl-adt catalog does. This post is Part 1: extract it, and browse it. Part 2 unplugs from SAP entirely and hands the file to an AI agent.

Summary​

This article demonstrates how to integrate SAP BW data in Microsoft Fabric using ERPL, providing a comprehensive guide for connecting enterprise SAP systems to Microsoft's modern data platform.