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


In this chapter, we will move to the next object in the Data Services hierarchy of objects used in ETL design: the workflow object. Workflows do not perform any movement of data themselves; their main purpose is to group dataflows, scripts, and other workflows together.

In other words, workflows are container objects grouping pieces of ETL code. They help define the dependencies between various pieces of ETL code in order to provide robust and flexible ETL architecture.

I will also show you how you can query the Data Services repository using database tools in order to query the hierarchy of objects directly and will show you how this hierarchy is stored in repository database tables. This may be very useful if you want to understand a bit more about how the software is functioning "under the hood".

Additionally, we will build a real-life use case ETL code by populating dimension tables in data warehouse. This use case example will include the functionality already reviewed in...