SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW) is SAP’s Enterprise Data Warehouse product.[1] It can transform and consolidate business information from virtually any source system.[citation needed] It ran on industry standard RDBMS until version 7.3 at which point it began to transition onto SAP's HANA in-memory DBMS, particularly with the release of version 7.4.
Latterly, it evolved into a product called BW/4HANA so as to align with SAP's sister ERP Product called S/4HANA. This strategy allowed SAP to engineer the database to use the HANA in-Memory database. Consequently, this facilitates the push down of complex OLAP based functions to the database as opposed to NetWeaver ABAP Application Server to improve performance.[citation needed] The product is also more open and can incorporate SAP and Non-SAP data more easily.[citation needed]
In 1998 SAP released the first version of SAP BW, providing a model-driven approach to EDW that made data warehousing easier and more efficient, particularly for SAP R/3 data. Since then, SAP BW has evolved to become a key component for thousands of companies. An article,[2] provided the history of SAP BW from inception to the newer releases powered by SAP HANA.