Never trust the GUI. Trust M_MVC_TABLES . If the RECORD count in HANA doesn't match the ROWS in SE16 for your fact table, you are already in performance hell. The "Transparent Filter" Lie Another gem likely buried around page 28 of that PDF is the revelation about SID (Surrogate ID) navigation .
Now go check your RSDD_HDB logs. You’ll probably find an index that hasn’t been rebuilt since 2018.
Why page 28 of the underground manuals still matters in the era of BW/4HANA
Have your own page 28 story from BW 7.4? Share your worst "HANA hangover" tale in the comments below. sap bw 7.4 practical guide pdf 28
The fix? Rebuild your CompositeProvider as a HANA Calculation View directly in the HANA Studio (or XSA). Then consume it in BW via an External View.
Let’s crack open what that page really meant—and why its lessons are more critical today than ever. BW 7.4 was billed as "HANA-powered." But if you migrated an old system, you quickly realized that simply flipping the switch to "HANA-optimized" didn't fix everything. The practical guide on page 28 likely pointed to a single, brutal truth: Your InfoProviders were still physically optimized for row-based storage.
The deep insight? The BIA INDEX (the legacy accelerator) was dead. In its place, HANA calculated views. But if you used standard MultiProviders or Infocubes (yes, people still used Infocubes in 7.4), you were forcing HANA to emulate a bitmap index. Never trust the GUI
It had one foot in the legacy world of transparent tables, aggregate rollups, and process chains that looked like spaghetti. And its other foot was firmly planted in the future—in-memory computing, columnar storage, and the promise of "instant" reporting.
Why? Because the HANA calculation engine would try to union the Active table and the Change Log table for every single query. Over time, your "virtual" provider becomes slower than a standard InfoCube. You might be thinking, "BW 7.4 is out of mainstream maintenance. Why does this matter?"
Page 28 would show you the dark art of the — specifically, how to convert your cube to "cube merge" mode and enable INMEMORY_AGGREGATION . The "Transparent Filter" Lie Another gem likely buried
Page 28 would have scolded you: "Index maintenance is not a monthly job. It is a post-load job." The practical guide’s 28th page probably had a flowchart. On one side: Advanced DSO . On the other: CompositeProvider . In the middle: Open ODS Views .
If you have administered or developed on SAP BW 7.4 (the last great "classic" BW release before the HANA-only revolution), you know the truth: It was a hybrid beast.
For years, a quiet, dog-eared document circulated among senior BW consultants: a PDF simply titled "SAP BW 7.4 Practical Guide." And within that guide, was the threshold.
In older BW releases, the system was brilliant at navigating via SID tables. In 7.4 on HANA, the game changed. The guide would warn you: "Stop forcing HANA to behave like an OLAP processor."