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."

Now go check your RSDD_HDB logs. You’ll probably find an index that hasn’t been rebuilt since 2018.

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.

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 .

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.

Page 28 of a good practical guide would have shown you the exact ABAP report to run: RSDDB_INDEX_ANALYZE and, more importantly, RSDD_HDB_TRANSFER_DBSTATS .

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.

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.

Have your own page 28 story from BW 7.4? Share your worst "HANA hangover" tale in the comments below.

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 .

Page 28 would show you the dark art of the — specifically, how to convert your cube to "cube merge" mode and enable INMEMORY_AGGREGATION .

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 .

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.

Here is the deep technical reality that most architects ignored:

If you see Column Search taking longer than Join Processing , you have a classic 7.4 problem: Your HANA model is emulating a row-store.