Book Image

SAP Data Services 4.x Cookbook

Book Image

SAP Data Services 4.x Cookbook

Overview of this book

Want to cost effectively deliver trusted information to all of your crucial business functions? SAP Data Services delivers one enterprise-class solution for data integration, data quality, data profiling, and text data processing. It boosts productivity with a single solution for data quality and data integration. SAP Data Services also enables you to move, improve, govern, and unlock big data. This book will lead you through the SAP Data Services environment to efficiently develop ETL processes. To begin with, you’ll learn to install, configure, and prepare the ETL development environment. You will get familiarized with the concepts of developing ETL processes with SAP Data Services. Starting from smallest unit of work- the data flow, the chapters will lead you to the highest organizational unit—the Data Services job, revealing the advanced techniques of ETL design. You will learn to import XML files by creating and implementing real-time jobs. It will then guide you through the ETL development patterns that enable the most effective performance when extracting, transforming, and loading data. You will also find out how to create validation functions and transforms. Finally, the book will show you the benefits of data quality management with the help of another SAP solution—Information Steward.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
SAP Data Services 4.x Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Introduction


This chapter will guide you through the advanced ETL design methods. Most of them will utilize Data Services features and functionality already explained in the previous chapters. As you have probably noticed, there are many ways to do the same thing in Data Services. The methods and logic you apply to solve the specific problem often depend on environment characteristics and some other conditions, such as development resources and extract requirements applied to the source systems. On the contrary, some of the methods and techniques explained further do not depend on all these factors and could be considered as ETL development best practices.

In this chapter we will discuss a very popular method of populating slowly changing dimensions in data warehouse, which require the use of a combination of Data Services transforms and dataflow design techniques.

We will also review automatic recovery methods available in Data Services, which allow you to easily restart previously failed...