SID (Surrogate-ID) translates a potentially long key for an InfoObject into a short four-byte integer, which saves I/O and memory during OLAP.

A source system is a protocol that BW uses to find and extract data. When the source system is a non-SAP system, such as a flat file or a third-party tool, the maximum number of characters allowed for the technical name is 10. When the source system is an SAP system, either R/3 or BW, the technical name matches the logical system name. The maximum number of characters allowed for the technical name is 32.

A star schema is a technique used in the data warehouse database design to help data retrieval for online analytical processing.

For a SQL statement, many execution plans are possible. The database optimizer generates the most efficient execution plan based on either the heuristic ranking of available execution plans or the cost calculation of available execution plans. Statistics is the information that the cost-based optimizer uses to calculate the cost of available execution plans and select the most appropriate one for execution. BW uses the cost-base optimizer for Oracle databases.

System Administration Assistant is a collection of tools used to monitor and analyze general system operation conditions.

The system landscape specifies the role of each system and the paths used in transporting objects among the various systems.