Infocube Compression

I was dealing with the tab "compression" while managing the infocube, was able to compress the infocube and send in the E- table but was unable to find the concrete answer on the following isssues:

1. What is the exact scenario when we use compression?

2. What actually happens in the practical scenario when we do compression?

3. What are the advantages of compressing a infocube?

4. What are the disadvantages of compressing a infocube?

1. Compression creates a new cube that has consolidated and summed duplicate information.

2. When you compress, BW does a group by on dimensions and a sum on measures... this eliminates redundent
information.

3. Compressed infocubes require less storage space and are faster for retrieval of information.

4. Once a cube is compressed, you cannot alter the information in it. This can be a big problem if there
is an error in some of the data that has been compressed.

I understand the advantage to compressed the infocube is the performance. But I have a doubt. If I compressed one or more request ID of my infocube the data it will continue to appear in my reports (Analyzer)?

The data will always be there in the Infocube. The only thing that would be missing is the request id's.. you can take a look in to your packet dimension and see that it would be empty after you compress.

Compression yeap its for performance. But before doing this compression you should keep in mind one thing very carefully.

1) If your cube is loading data with custom defined deltas you should check whether delta is happening properly or not, procedure is compress some req and schedule the delta.

2) If your system having outbounds from cube and this happening with request ids then you need to follow some other procedure because request ids wont be available after compression.

These two things are very important when you go for compression.