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Business Intelligence Training. Siemens Engineering Pakistan Zeeshan Shah December 07, 2009. Agenda. Introduction to the SAP Business Intelligence 1.1. Importance of BI Today 1.2. Data Warehouses 1.3 OLTP & OLAP Components of the BI System 2.1 Source Systems Modeling
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Business Intelligence Training Siemens Engineering Pakistan Zeeshan Shah December 07, 2009
Agenda • Introduction to the SAP Business Intelligence 1.1. Importance of BI Today 1.2. Data Warehouses 1.3 OLTP & OLAP • Components of the BI System 2.1 Source Systems • Modeling 3.1 Objects in BI 3.2 Modeling • Classic Star Schema
Business Intelligence • Business intelligence (BI) is a broad category of applications and technologies for gathering, storing, analyzing, and providing access to data to help enterprise users make better business decisions. • BI allows information systems to meet the following requirements required by decision makers: • Coverage of all business processes: cross-system and cross-process analyses are becoming increasingly important • High-quality decision-making support: The BI system must support the requirements of both operative and strategic management; only then is it possible to support decisions fully • Short implementation time with less resources: As well being quick to implement, a Data Warehouse must enable simple and quick access to relevant data, avoiding the labor-intensive preparation of heterogeneous data
Business Intelligence • In summary, • “Business Intelligence software is the collection of applications needed to make sense of business data”.
Data Warehouses • The Data Warehouse, a component of the Business Intelligence tool set, is the more specific tool responsible for the • cleanup, • loading, and • storage of the data needed by the business. • A Data Warehouse can help to organize the data. It brings together all operative DataSources (these are mostly heterogeneous and have differing degrees of detail). • A warehouse has the following properties:: • Read-only access: • Cross-organizational focus: • Data Warehouse data is stored persistently over a particular time period. • Designed for efficient query processing:
Business Environments • Business environments are divided into: • OLAP (BI/Data Warehouse System ) • OLTP • Differences Between a BI/Data Warehouse System (OLAP) and an OLTP System • Level of detail: • History: Archiving data in the OLTP area means it is stored with minimal history • Changeability: Frequent data changes are a feature of the operative area,while in the Data Warehouse, the data is frozen after a certain point for analysis • Integration: In contrast to the OLTP environment, requests for comprehensive, integrated information for analysis are very high • Read access: An OLAP environment is optimized for read access. • It is most advantageous to technically separate all aggregated reporting-related demands made on the Data Warehouse from the OLTP system.
Components of the SAP BI system • The BI database is divided into self-contained business information providers (InfoProviders). • You analyze the database of BI by defining queries against these InfoProviders in the BEx Query Designer • Data analysis based on multidimensional Data Sources (OLAP reporting) allows you to analyze more than one dimension of an InfoProvider (Time,place, and product) at the same time. • you can make any number of variance analyses (plan/actual comparison and business year comparison) • You can analyze data in the following areas in the Business Explorer • BEx Analyzer (Microsoft Excel-based analysis tool with pivot-table-like features) • BEx Web Analyzer (Web-based analysis tool with pivot-table-like features) • BEx Web Application Designer (customer-defined and SAP BI Content provided) • BEx Report Designer (highly formatted Web output)
Components of the SAP BI system • The Data Warehouse architecture is structured in three layers: • sourcing the data, • storing It in the warehouse, and • reporting on it with analytics. • Source Systems • A source system provides the BI system with data. BI distinguishes between source systems: • mySAP Business Suite • Non-SAP systems • Flat files • Multidimensional sources from other Data Warehouses • XML: • Relational data in other database management systems • Data providers • Databases (DB Connect) or complex sources • You can send data from SAP and non-SAP sources to BI using SAP Exchange Infrastructure (SAP XI) Data transfer using SAP XI is based on (SOAP).
Modeling • An InfoProvider is an object for which queries can be createdor executed in BEx. InfoProviders are physical objects or sometimes logical views that are relevant for reporting • InfoCubes are the primary objects used to support BI queries. They are designed to store summarized and aggregated data, for long periods of time. • DataStore objects are another primary physical database storage object used in BI. They are designed to store very detailed (transaction level) records.
Classifying InfoObjects • InfoObjects are primarily divided into the major types • Key figures or • characteristics. • Time characteristics, • technical characteristics, and • units. • Characteristics InfoObjects are used to analyze key figures, for example, Customer (characteristic) Sales (key figure).
The Classic Star Schema: The EDW Database Schema • This database schema classifies two groups of data: • Facts (sales amount or quantity, for example) and • dimension attributes (customer, material, or time, for example) • The fact data (values for the facts) is stored in a highly normalized fact table. • The values of the dimension attributes are stored from a technical perspective, in various denormalized dimension tables • In the star schema design shown, the key of the dimension tables is a machine-generated dimension key (DIM ID) that uniquely defines a combination of dimension attribute values • The DIM ID (a sequentially assigned number) is a foreign key in the fact table. In this way, all data records in the fact table can be uniquely identified.
The Classic Star Schema: The EDW Database Schema • A InfoCube consists of precisely one fact table* in which key figure values are stored. • A fact table can contains a maximum of 233 key figures. • A InfoCube usually has a minimum of four dimension tables and a maximum of 16. Of these, 13 of the 16 are customer-created and three are the SAP-supplied dimensions: • Units dimension table • Data Package dimension table • Time dimension table • Customer dimensions contain SIDs linked to a maximum of 248 characteristics InfoObjects. • Data Package and Time dimension tables are always present in a InfoCube • Additional information about characteristics InfoObjects is referred to as master data in the BI system. A distinction is made between the following master data types: • Attributes • Texts • (External) Hierarchies