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Introducing SAP Data Services solution

Objective

After completing this lesson, you will be able to Describe SAP Data Services solution.

SAP Data Services in a nutshell

SAP Data Services: What for ?

Let's first look at what SAP Data Services can help you with :

Turn your data into a trusted, ever-ready resource

With some of the very best functionality for data integration, quality, and cleansing, SAP Data Services software improves the quality of data across the enterprise. As part of the information management layer of SAP’s Business Technology Platform, it delivers trusted, relevant, and timely information to drive better business outcomes.

You can use the functionality of SAP Data Services with virtually all data in real-time or batch processing scenarios. You can manage data quality within a wide variety of standard and proprietary applications, platforms, and databases – including those from SAP and third parties.

Unlock meaning from all of your organization’s data

With this software, you can access and process structured and unstructured content from a variety of data sources across your enterprise. These include SAP and third-party data stores. The software lets you extract, transform, and load any data source into any target source to deliver it where and when it's needed, regardless of the size or format .

Simplify data management

SAP Data Services can apply data changes in various data formats, including any custom format using a SAP Data Services adapter. Enterprise users can apply data changes against multiple back-office systems singularly or sequentially. By generating calls native to the system in question, Data Services makes it unnecessary to develop and maintain customized code to manage the process.

Access, load, and move data while optimizing speed and performance

SAP Data Services generates SQL that is optimized for the specific target database (for example, Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, and of course SAP HANA). Automatically generated, optimized code reduce the cost of maintaining data warehouses and enables quick building of data solutions that meet user requirements faster than other methods (for example, custom-coding, direct-connect calls, or PL/SQL).

SAP Data Services unique combination of features allows you to:

Stage data in an operational data store, data warehouse, or data mart
Update staged data in batch or real-time modes
Create a single environment for developing, testing, and deploying the entire data integration platform
Manage a single metadata repository to capture the relationships between different extraction and access methods and provide integrated lineage and impact analysis

SAP Data Services Tools

The Data Services Designer

Data Services Designer (Designer in short) is a Windows client application used to create, test, and manually execute jobs that transform data and load it into a target database or file system.

Using the Designer, you can create data management applications that consist of data mappings, transformations, and control logic.

You can create objects that represent data sources, and then drag, drop, and configure them in flow diagrams.

The objects created are stored in a local repository. You can then trigger the job server to run jobs for initial application testing.

Watch this video to learn more about the Designer user interface:

The Data Services Repository

There are few prerequisites before you can use the Data Services Designer to start creating and executing ETL jobs. Configuring these components is usually the task of ETL administrators, but understanding how they work is useful for ETL designers also.

One of them is the Local Repository, which is a set of database tables for storing the objects you create in the Designer. These can be created during the SAP Data Services installation, or any time (using the Repository Manager).

The database systems supported for local repositories are the most widely used RDBMS on the market. The local repositories do NOT need to be in the same database system of the actual data upon which you intend to perform ETL work. In other words, your data could be in Hadoop, while your local repositories are in SQL Anywhere.

The Data Services Job Server

Each repository is associated with at least one Data Services job server.

When Data Services jobs are executed, the job server retrieves the job from its associated repository and starts Data Services engine processes to perform data extraction, transformation, and movement. Data Services engine processes use parallel processing and in-memory data transformations to deliver high data throughput and scalability.

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