Illustrating the Role of SAP Datasphere in SAP Business Data Cloud

In this lesson, you will learn how SAP Datasphere is integrated into SAP Business Data Cloud and how you can implement customer-defined models.

Purpose of SAP Datasphere

In 2023, SAP introduced SAP Datasphere as its public-cloud-based Business Data Fabric. This software-as-a-service solution allows you to integrate, transform, and enrich data in the landscape while keeping the context of SAP data.

SAP Datasphere offers the following options for semantic enrichment:

• Classify an entire data set as fact (with measures), dimension (without measures, but with attributes), hierarchy (for a parent-child relationship), or text (for language-dependent descriptions).
• Specify the meaning of a field - for example, as a date field, currency field, or unit field.
• Define the aggregation type of a measure as a sum, maximum, minimum, or average. Optionally, add a reference to a unit of measure or currency field.
• Associate additional attributes, texts, or hierarchies with a field.

Generally, you consume the high-level semantically rich models with SAP Analytics Cloud stories for analytical and planning use cases. Other use cases include machine learning, no- or pro-code dashboards, or access from 3rd-party models.

For details, refer to the following learning journeys:

• Exploring SAP Datasphere
• Introduction to SAP Datasphere

You can use SAP Business Data Cloud without installing an SAP Datasphere component. But then you would miss the chance to have semantically rich analytic models defined on top of your Data Products.

And if you want to install an Insight App to benefit from out-of-the-box reporting capability from SAP, you must include SAP Datasphere in your SAP Business Data Cloud landscape.

First, SAP Datasphere is used to create the analytic models on top of the Foundation Services Data Products as the base for the Insight Apps. The SAP Datasphere models are then stored in SAP-managed secured spaces where you can't modify them.

A second scenario is to use SAP Datasphere to create custom models on top of SAP-managed Data Products, maybe mixing them with 3rd-party Data Products. For this scenario, you need to activate the corresponding Data Packages and then install the Data Products into SAP Datasphere.

This installation replicates the data into SAP Datasphere.

When your Data Product is installed, you can apply row-level authorizations and add semantic meaning by creating custom analytic models.

In this lesson, you've learned how the SAP Datasphere tenant provided within the SAP Business Data Cloud solution is used to host the analytic models of the Insight Packages. It also allows you to create your own data models on top of SAP Data Products.