NetWeaver BI (a.k.a. BW) and Advanced DB Functionality (Part 2)

Competitors, analysts and customers frequently confront SAP with a statement that NW BI (a.k.a. BW) could provide better performance if it simply employed some of the performance-enhancing features that have been added to the mainstream RDBMS software over the last few release cycles. They often point to materialized views (or summary tables), new index types (e.g. bitmaps or domain vectors), aggregation operators (like grouping sets, rollup), loaders, etc. In this 2^nd part of a serie of 3 weblogs I'd like to briefly discuss the frequently raised questions whether materialized view (I'll use this popular term; this does not mean that what I say refers to Oracle only; it also applies to DB2's automatic summary tables or SQL-server's view indexes) would not be a good alternative or substitute to NW BI aggregates.