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Business Intelligence

David Cheemakuti

Review of Previous Presentation Datawarehousing concept


BW Architecture

DataWarehousing
DataWarehouse is the main repository of an organizations historical Data. It contains the raw material for management's decision support system The critical factor leading to the use of a data warehouse is that a data analyst can perform complex queries and analysis, such as data mining, on the information without slowing down the operational systems.

Sales AnalysisA Business Scenario


Suppose that you are a sales manager, who is responsible for planning and implementing sales strategy. Your tasks include the following: Monitoring and forecasting sales demands and pricing trends Managing sales objectives and coordinating the sales force and distributors Reviewing the sales activities of each representative, office, and region

To extract, transfer, transform, and load (ETTL) data from diverse data sources into the data warehouse

Online transaction processing, or OLTP, refers to a class of systems that facilitate and manage transaction-oriented applications, typically for data entry and retrieval transaction processing Online Analytical Processing, or OLAP is an approach to quickly provide answers to analytical queries that are multidimensional in nature.

Business Intelligence (BI) is the broad category of applications and technologies for gathering, storing, analyzing, and providing access to data to help users make better business decisions. BI applications include the activities of decision support systems, query and reporting, OLAP, forecasting and data mining.

SAP BW Architecture

Source Systems
mySAP Business suite: BI is fully integrated into mySAP Business suite. It functions as the central data warehousing tool. Predefined extraction structures and programs are delivered by SAP. These allow source data from the mySAP business suite to be loaded directly into the warehouse. SAP XI: Data can be sent from SAP and nonSAP sources to BI using SAP XI (Exchange information). The data transfer here is based in SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol).

Source Systems
Non-SAP Systems: A big advantage of BI is the open architecture. It is possible to use BI as a consolidated data basis for reporting that covers the entire organization, particularly in the heterogeneous system landscape. External Data Providers: Target-oriented data can be provided to BI by the external data providers like ACNielsen and Dun&Bradstreet that provides research data which can be loaded to BI for benchmarking and then measures against own operative data.

DB Connect: It allows all relational databases to access directly. It is used to set up connection between DBMS in the external database. By importing metadata and original data, the necessary structures can be generated in BI and data can be loaded easily and efficiently.

UD Connect: It is used to access all relational and multidimensional data sources. UD connect converts and transfers multidimensional data as flat data. This technology runs on J2EE Engine and supports the J2EE connector architecture.

BI Service API: It connects the SAP source systems to BI. The Service API is a technology package in SAP source systems of BI that facilitates a high level of integration for data transfer from SAP source systems to BI.

File: SAP supports automatic import of files in CSV or ASCII format for flat files

Web Service: A Simple Object Access Protocol is used to read XML data and to load it in a BI Server.

Business Advanced Programming Interface (BAPI): This the used an interface between the Legacy applications like Oracle with the BI.

Persistent Staging Area: It stores data in the original format while being imported from the source system. PSA allows for quality check before the data are loaded into their destinations, such as ODS Objects or InfoCubes

Data Warehouse: It holds the very detailed

data for longer periods.

Operational Data store: It contains detailed data for low-level operational needs. Data is not kept for long time.

Data Marts: It provides summarized or aggregated data with the database objects for long-time reference. Most of the BI data come from this area.

Administrator Workbench maintains meta-data and all BW objects. It has two components: BW Scheduler for scheduling jobs to load data BW Monitor for monitoring the status of data loads

BW Business Explorer (BEx): BEx Analyzer is Microsoft Excel with a BW add-in. BEx Browser works much like an information center, allowing users to organize and access all kinds of information

Staging Engine: It implements data mapping and transformation. Triggered by BW Scheduler, it sends requests to a source system for data loading. The source system then selects and transfers data into BW.

ODS (Operational Data Store) Objects allow us to build a multilayer structure for operational data reporting. They are not based on the star schema and are used primarily for detail reporting, rather than for dimensional analysis. Info Cubes are the fact tables and their associated dimension tables in a star schema

Data Manager maintains data in ODS Objects and InfoCubes and tells the OLAP Processor what data are available for reporting

Metadata Repository contains information about the data warehouse. Meta-data comprise data about data. Metadata Repository contains two types of meta-data: business-related (definitions and descriptions used for reporting) and technical (structure and mapping rules used for data extraction and transformation). We use Metadata Manager to maintain Metadata Repository

BDS (Business Document Services) stores documents. The documents can appear in various formats, such as Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, and HTML. BEx Analyzer saves query results, or MS Excel files, as workbooks in the BDS. User Roles are a concept used in SAP authorization management. BW organizes BDS documents according to User Roles. Only users assigned to a particular User Role can access the documents associated with that User Role

OLAP Processor is the analytical processing engine. It retrieves data from the database, and it analyzes and presents those data according to users' requests

Concepts covered:
What is DataWarehousing (Decision Support system) Concept of Datawarehousing(ETL Process) Introduction to Star Schema BW architecture

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