With the increasing popularity of data discovery, self-service BI, and visualizations around the world, more and more tools are being developed for data discovery, which allows you to eliminate the complexities of analyzing and discovering data. You can learn the techniques of data discovery, build amazing visualizations, create fantastic stories, and share these visualizations through electronic mediums with one of the most powerful tools: SAP Lumira. Moreover, this book will focus on extracting data from different sources, such as plain text, Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, the SAP BusinessObjects BI platform, SAP HANA, and SQL databases. Finally, it will teach you how to publish the result of your painstaking work on various mediums, such as SAP BI Clients, SAP Lumira Cloud, and so on. This book provides you with a step-by-step guide and discusses the essentials of SAP Lumira, starting with an overview of SAP Lumira family of products. This book demonstrates various data discovery techniques using real-world scenarios of an online e-commerce retailer. Moreover, this book will provide you with detailed recipes of installations, administration, and customizations of SAP Lumira. In addition, it shows you how to work with data, starting from acquiring data from various data sources to preparing and visualizing it through the rich functionalities of SAP Lumira. Finally, it teaches you how to present data via a data story or infographic and publish it across your organization or World Wide Web.
Chapter 1, Meeting SAP Lumira, talks about SAP Lumira, a powerful data discovery tool for end users. In this chapter, you will learn about SAP Lumira and the different data discovery processes, in addition to the SAP Lumira interface. It also teaches you how to deploy SAP Lumira on your computer. It also provides real-world examples, which will help you to learn the essentials of SAP Lumira.
Chapter 2, Connecting to Data Sources, explains the various data sources that hold valuable data. It provides information on the different kinds of data sources you can discover and how to use them with SAP Lumira data connectors.
Chapter 3, Preparing Data, takes you through the various techniques of data preparation, such as cleaning, filtering, formatting, enriching, and merging.
Chapter 4, Visualizing Data and Telling Stories with It, tells you how to discover data and create amazing visualizations based on your data. It teaches you how to tell a story with your data so that it is clear and interesting for everyone. SAP Lumira provides you the opportunity to build an infographic based on your data. It allows you to share data visualization, datasets, and data stories through various channels easily.
Chapter 5, Rocking Your Data in the Sky - SAP Lumira Cloud, gives you information about SAP Lumira Cloud. The leaders of the IT industry build clouds and move their applications to the cloud, which gives fantastic flexibility and performance. SAP Lumira isn't an exception. This chapter takes a look at SAP Lumira Cloud and explores the basic functionality of the cloud solution.
Chapter 6, Administrating and Customizing SAP Lumira, provides information about the management of SAP Lumira. SAP Lumira provides you the opportunity to extend the rich functionality of a tool using the customization of an SDK. It teaches you how to create a custom data visualization and acquire basic knowledge about the SAP Lumira SDK.
Chapter 7, Connecting to SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform and SAP HANA, extends the SAP BIP functionality with rich data visualization and the discovery functionality of SAP Lumira. It also teaches you how to use SAP HANA as a data source for data visualization and learn some useful techniques about how to handle it with extremely large datasets of SAP HANA.
In order to start learning SAP Lumira and the techniques of data discovery, you need to have a passion for analytics software, data visualization, and new technologies. In addition, you should have access to the Internet so that you can download the SAP Lumira desktop and content for this book. SAP Lumira is a Windows-based application, and if you have a computer that runs an operation system other than Windows, you can use the virtual machine to run SAP Lumira on it.
If you are a SAP user, business analyst, BI developer, or even a junior data engineer who discovers data, then this book is exactly what you are looking for. Hands-on practical examples, real-world solutions, and best practices make this book an essential guide to learn a new tool to build creative visualizations using SAP Lumira. Clear a space on your desk and get ready to become a data geek.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "In text pad just type:
InstallDir=C:\Program Files\SAP Lumira\."
A block of code is set as follows:
select count(*) from dim_dates; select count(*) from dim_orders; select count(*) from dim_products;
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Find distributive and double click on SAPLumirainstall.exe".
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