The data warehouse is the entry point of the BI system from all other data sources. It is responsible for extracting the data from a various data sources, performing integrity checks, aggregating and storage of the data.
Normally business intelligence is run from a system separate from the day to day operative systems of the company. This is because the way data is stored for normal traditional database access is different from they way BI data should be stored. From the previous lesson you learned about the OLAP model, the BI system needs to be able to carry out OLAP processing on large amounts of data and the traditional access methods are not suitable. You will find out why in a later lesson where talk about the star schema.
Data acquisition
The first component of the data warehouse I will talk about is the data acquisition layer. This is responsible for feeding the BI system with data. The data can come from various source systems and is platform independent. Here are the various types of data sources that can be used to feed a BI system with data.
mySAP Business suite
mySAP Business suite is built on top of SAP Netweaver, of which BI is a component and it has entry points built in that can be used to feed the data warehouse with data.
XML data from Web services
SAP Netweaver is built with open standards in mind so any web service that can be used to send XML SOAP messages can communicate with the data warehouse.
SQL Databases
The data warehouse has a DBConnect component that is used to extract data from SQL databases.
Flat files
This comes mostly in the form of Excel spreadsheets. The data in the files can be imported using CSV formatted data.
BI Data Acquisition layer
BI Server
The BI server acts as the host for the data warehouse. It stores all the master and transaction data.
Before the data can be stored, it has to go through a process of cleansing and aggregation. The techie word used here is called ETL, extraction, transformation and loading.
The data is extracted from the various source systems to the temporary storage area called the persistent storage area (PSA) and then undergoes transformation which means the data in cleansed of duplicates, integrity violations etc. After this is done, the data can now be stored.
In the next lesson, I will talk about either the InfoCube or the InfoObject. I have to decide which should logically come up first.
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Hello James,
thank you so much for the knowledge you’re spreading.
I’m a Brazilian student interested in the “SAP world” and all these information are being very useful.
Thanks.