This is part 2 of the SAP Training online video series on how to create hierarchies. In this video I will explain what hierarchies are and show you how to set them up in SAP Business intelligence.

Let me know what you think of the video, do you have suggestions on what I should include in subsequent videos? Please leave a comment and let me know.

This is part 1 of the SAP Training online video series. In this video I will explain what hierarchies are and show you how to set them up in SAP Business intelligence.

Let me know what you think of the video, do you have suggestions on what I should include in subsequent videos? Please leave a comment and let me know.

It has been a while since my last post, there have been a lot of questions and emails going back and forth with you all. If you would like to take part in the discussion, and you are not subscribed yet, please do so in the box on the right.

Today, I am going back to basics and continuing the SAP BI training lessons. This is the reason I started this blog but
I have found out that the SAP landscape is wide and people have more questions not neccessarily pertaining to SAP Business Intelligence. Please let me know if you would like to see more posts on SAP BI.

Transformations

The topic of the day is Transformation. Transformation is all about mapping fields from source systems to destination databases. Sometimes, the mapping is one-to-one i.e you have a field in the source table that maps directly to the destination. It is also possible that the fields are not matched up correctly.

For example, length of the fields might be different in both or the way figures are calculated might also be different. A good example is VAT. The amount of value-added tax charged differs from country to country and this needs to be transformed (recalculated).
Transformation rules are used to perform these operations.

Transformation rules

Normally, when mapping fields on the InfoSource to the fields in the InfoCubes,the mapping was always one to one. In real time, this is not always the case. Some InfoObjects are not present in the InfoSource fields but have to be calculated. These calculations are done through transformations.

There are 7 different types of tranformations.

• Direct assignment
• Constants
• Reading master data
• Routines
• Formula
• Time updates
• No transformation

I shall use an example to explain these transformations. Take a look at the table below. It shows a simplistic view of a potential InfoSource that I want to transform to fields in the InfoCube. The InfoSource has the following fields, Product, Sales quantity and Price/unit. The destination InfoObjects are Product, Sales quantity, price per unit and revenue.

Source fields

Destination fields

Direct assignment

This will copy the value in the source field directly into the target field. For example the products, sales quantity will be transformed using direct assignment.

Constants

This transformation rule will fill the target field with a specified value. For example, the import data field can be filled with today’s date.

Routines

Routines are special code written to handle complex cases. There are start routines, end routines and expert routine Start routines are used to pre process the data before transformation, for example they can be used to eliminate empty fields before the process starts. This makes the process efficient when there a lot of records being imported and a handful will be empty fields.

End routines are used to post –process the data on a package-by-package basis. This can be used for integrity checks etc.

Routines are mostly written by ABAP consultants, you as a BI consultant will have to supply the specifications for the routine you would like to implement.

I will explain the rest (Formulas, Reading master data and time updates) in a later post. Do you have any special area of SAP business intelligence you would like more explanation on? Please leave a comment and let me know.

Today’s post is about the ETL process, which forms the basis of data flow in the SAP BI system.I will go into detail on what the E,T and L stand for and how they are tied together to move data into BI and up into the the point where it ready for reports to be made on that data.
The ETL process brings data from external sources into the BI system which will be used later for analysis. There are three stages in this process, which is derived from the abbreviation ETL
•    Extraction
•    Transformation
•    Loading

Extraction

Extraction is the process of bringing in raw data from a range of supported source systems into the persistent storage area (PSA). The two objects that are active in this process are the source systems and the PSA, which is sometimes referred to as the datasource. The PSA stores the data temporarily before the transformation process begins
There are lots of supported source systems which can be used to bring data into the PSA.

• XML, you can post data from web services that support the SOAP protocol to the BI system
• Data can also be extracted from custom databases. For example Oracle or SQL server databases. These use the DBConnect/UDConnect adapters
• Flat files like excel can serve the BI system with data using file interfaces
• Data can also be retrieved from SAP systems like HR, MM, SD, CRM. These connect using the BI service API

ETL PSA Soure system

Transformation

After the data has been extracted from the source system, it has to be cleansed and transformed into something meaningful for the BI system.  After the transformation has been done, it can be stored in the InfoObjects.
InfoSources are used for transformation. It serves like an adapter between the source systems and the InfoCubes.

All the fields in the source system are mapped to the corresponding fields (InfoObjects) in the InfoCube. For example customer name will correspond to client name InfoObject.
The InfoSource serves to make the InfoCube independent of the source system. When a source system is swapped for another one, only the InfoSource gets to change. Transformation rules are be applied to the InfoSource. This can be either direct correlations, formulas or combinations. I will discuss more on transformation rules in a later lesson

Loading

The next step in the process is to load the data into the end target. The end target referred to in this case is the InfoProvider of which there are many types. The load process will be different depending on which type of InfoProvider is being used. You can either have records being added and records being updated with some change management going on.
Now that the data is loaded, the stage is set for reports to be made. This is the reason why BI exists, to display reports for intelligent business decisions can be made.

There you have it, the ETL process being a major part of getting data ready for reports. If you have any questions, I would love to answer them, so leave a comment.

In SAP business Intelligence, InfoProviders are the basis of most of the reporting you will be doing in the real time. They are the objects that serve your reports with data. Hence the name InfoProviders.

There are two types of InfoProviders, these are listed below

• InfoCube, this type of InfoProvider stores the data in the system and makes it available for reporting.
• Virtual providers for example a Multiprovider, this will be covered in a later lesson but basically, this is a type of InfoProvider that does not store the data physically but combines the data from multiple InfoCubes into one view.As far as reporting is concerned, it does not know how the data is stored. Physically or not, the data is being presented to the reporting query in the same way.

A standard installation of SAP BI comes with a lot of default InfoCubes that models many business processes from Financials to Sales and distribution. As a SAP BI consultant, most of the time you will not need to create your own InfoCube but rather use one out of the box or customize the existing one to suit your needs.

An InfoCube is modelled after the extended star schema shown in the picture above. The fact table in the center of the cube contains the key figures. The fact table is surrounded by dimensions which contain characteristics.

These are some statistics that are important if you plan to take the certification exam or during interviews.

• An InfoCube consists of one fact table that is used to store key figures.
• The maximum number of key figures that the fact table can store is 233
• The same fact table can have a minimum of 4 and a maximum 16 dimension tables.
• 3 of these dimension tables are supplied by SAP. They are the Unit, data package, and time dimensions.
• The customer can create 13 dimensions.
• Each of the 13 dimensions can have a maximum of 248 InfoObjects.
• Each InfoObject can also contain master data in the form of Text, Attributes and Hierarchies.

So you can see how advanced modelling is done in SAP business intelligence. This allows for efficient reporting at the later stages.

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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That is the

For today’s post, I will be talking about InfoObjects. SAP BI uses certain structures to model real world data. The InfoObject is one of these structures. InfoObjects are used to evaluate the smallest units of business data. An example is best to explain this.

A company like IBM will have products and customers. A customer is named John Smith and he buys a laptop with the model number LAP001. An InfoObject can be used to model the customer name and the product code. In this case, John Smith is an InfoObject which is the customer name. LAP001 is also an InfoObject.

This is the first of the series of posts I will be doing to document my SAP BI training. If you are new to this blog, let me explain.

I have decided to pay some hard-earned money to get trained in SAP business intelligence. I have also decided to post some of my notes here for two reasons,

1. For you to be able to follow along and get educated along with me.
2. To help myself understand what I am learning. I will not be able to write an article on something I don’t understand and this way I am forced to go and do some more research.

Okay let’s start, the first course was about the basic ideas of SAP BI business intelligence, what it is all about and why it is important to companies.

Why is business intelligence (BI) needed?

Modern day Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems have made it easier to gather data about almost anything. This can be the date and time a customer ordered a product, the number of orders over the lifetime of that customer etc. Multiply this amount of data by the number of customers the company has and you can easily see that for a customer that has millions of customers, the amount of data gathered is huge. Another problem is that the data might be saved in different formats, different databases.

But this is necessarily not a problem. If you have a system that can efficiently gather the data from all theses sources and produce some meaning from it, that can potentially be powerful information for a company.

This is the goal of SAP business intelligence, to streamline the whole process all the way from

1. Gathering the data from all available sources

2. Storing it efficiently for fast and easy access,

3. Analyzing the data and creating reports that can be used to draw meaningful information.

4. Presenting reports in a multimedia format, in the form of charts, images etc.

5. And ultimately help the user in efficient decision making.

If someone asks you, what is a business intelligence system. You tell them it is one that basically makes sense of data.

This is all I have for now, there was more to the lesson. Stuff about the Data warehouse side of the story and the differences between a BI/Warehouse (OLAP) system and a classic OLTP system. This is better explained using a video. So I might do a screencast next.

Your comments are welcome as always….

You can find all the other lessons on SAP BI Training here.