Now go check your RSDD_HDB logs. You’ll probably find an index that hasn’t been rebuilt since 2018.
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 .
Why? Because HANA’s optimizer relies on fresh statistics. If your stats were from the last system copy three months ago, HANA would generate a brilliant execution plan for a dataset that no longer existed. You’d see a query take 12 seconds that should take 200 milliseconds.
Run transaction ST04 (DBACOCKPIT). Look for "High Wait Time on Locks." Then, run RSRT with the technical name of your slowest query. Turn on "HANA Execution Details." sap bw 7.4 practical guide pdf 28
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.
That is the legacy of page 28. It wasn't just a guide. It was a warning: Respect the database, or the database will humble you. The "28" in your search isn't a version number. It’s a reminder that the deepest knowledge is always hidden in the appendices and the troubleshooting sections—not the glossy introduction.
Why page 28 of the underground manuals still matters in the era of BW/4HANA Now go check your RSDD_HDB logs
In BW 3.5 and 7.0, your fact tables (F-fact tables and E-fact tables) were designed to minimize disk I/O for row-based databases like Oracle or DB6. But on HANA, row storage is poison. It destroys parallelization.
To truly clean house, you didn't need a re-org. You needed RSRV analysis (transaction code) to identify "empty requests" and then RSDD_HDB_DROP_DB_INDEX followed by RSDD_HDB_CREATE_DB_INDEX .
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. Trust M_MVC_TABLES
Page 28 wasn't about the BEx Analyzer or the new CompositeProvider. No. Page 28 was the troubleshooting manifesto . It was the section that taught you how to stop building and start healing .
Beyond the GUI: Unearthing the Raw Performance Secrets of SAP BW 7.4 (A Deep Dive into the ‘Practical Guide’ Ethos)
Here is the deep technical reality that most architects ignored: