With a 15% share of the beer market, the Radeberger Gruppe is currently Germany's market leader and is part of the Dr. August Oetker KG family business in Bielefeld. The Radeberger Gruppe considers itself the guardian of German beer culture: the group is committed to regionality and emotionally-charged brands to cultivate the diversity of German beer, and contributes with its innovative business concept to advancing the German beer and beverage market.
Project Execution
The Radeberger Gruppe uses SAP NetWeaver 7.0 to manage its business data. In recent years, the underlying database has grown relentlessly to approx. 1.1 TB. Approximately 20 GB were added each month. This also caused the costs of storing and backing up this data to constantly rise. At the same time, performance in the SAP BW system was decreasing.
It was whilst doing market research that the BI team of the Radeberger Gruppe came across PBS Software, the ILM specialist and SAP partner in Bensheim. During initial meetings PBS presented the nearline archiving solution CBW NLS IQ.
This solution enables you to archive the data in a Sybase IQ database and not in a separate ADK file as is the case with the traditional SAP archiving approach. This database uses column-based technology and stores the archived data in compressed form. Thus the data volume is reduced on average by about 70 percent while the data is still available for reporting despite archiving. A key user test phase started for the nearline storage solution. Quickly all problems were eliminated after the test phase, and production operation was started.
Summary
To date, the Radeberger Gruppe's BI team has been able to observe an improvement in performance by an average of 40 percent in SAP NetWeaver BW compared to the traditional database. No special training was needed for the around 800 users working with the SAP system since the way they handle the data has not changed.
The omission of the aggregates is another advantage. With regard to the already archived data cubes, this is on average 80 percent compression for the data that has been archived so far, and thus saves disk space is saved.