Book Image

SAP Data Services 4.x Cookbook

By : Shomnikov
Book Image

SAP Data Services 4.x Cookbook

By: Shomnikov

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 (14 chapters)
11
11. Working with SAP Applications
13
Index

Loading data from a flat file


You can use the same File Format object created in the previous recipe to load data from a flat file. In the following section, we will take a closer look at file format options relevant to loading data from the files.

How to do it…

  1. Create a new job and a new dataflow object in it.

  2. Create a new text file, Friends_30052015.txt, with the following lines inside it:

    NAME|DOB|HEIGHT|HOBBY
    JANE|12.05.1985|176|HIKING
    JOHN|07-08-1982|182|FOOTBALL
    STEVE|01.09.1976|152|SLEEPING|10
    DAVE|27.12.1983|AB5
  3. Go to Local Object Library and create a new file format by right-clicking on Flat Files and choosing New.

  4. Populate the File Format options as shown in the following screenshot:

    • Delimiters | Column is set to | in this case as our file has the pipe as a delimiter.

    • NULL Indicator was set to NULL, which means that only NULL values in the incoming file are interpreted as NULL when read by Data Services. The other "empty" values will be interpreted as empty strings.

    • Date format is set...