Analytical View of Business Information Warehouse Model

SAP’s BW is based on "Enhanced Star schema" or "Info Cubes" database design. This database design has a central database table, known as ‘Fact Table’ which is surrounded by associated dimension tables. These dimension tables contain references to the pointer tables that point to the master data tables which in turn contain Master data objects such as customer, material and destination country stored in BW as Info objects. An InfoObjects can contain single field definitions such as transaction data or complex Customer Master Data that hold attributes, hierarchy and customer texts that are stored in their own tables.

The BW product is designed to store all business-critical information contained in the R/3 OLTP (online transaction processing) system and other non-SAP systems in a form that is easy to access and analyze using the BW client tools.

The database design used to meet these objectives is an "Enhanced Star Schema" or "InfoCube" (the data against which the end user runs queries).