Basic concepts of SAP bi

SAP Bi basic concepts sap Bi Basic Concepts

Basic Concepts

Basic Data Warehouse Theory

Data Warehouse is the core of the system's structured environment and the basis for decision-making support system (DSS) processing; its concept was proposed by Dr. William inmon, a famous American Information Engineering expert, in early 1990s. He believes: "a data warehouse is usually a topic-oriented, integrated, time-varying, but the information itself is relatively stable for support.ManagementA collection of Personnel Decision data ."

TopicIt refers to the key aspects that users are concerned about when making decisions using data warehouses, such as revenue, customers, and sales channels;Subject-orientedThe information in the data warehouse is organized by topic, rather than organized according to business functions as in the business support system.

IntegrationThe data warehouse information is not simply extracted from various business systems, but is processed, sorted, and aggregated in a series of processes. Therefore, the information in the data warehouse is about the entireEnterprise.

Changes over timeThe index data warehouse information does not only reflect the current state of the enterprise, but records information from a certain time point in the past to the current phase. With this information, you can make a quantitative analysis and prediction of the enterprise's development history and future trends.

Relatively stableIt means that once a data entry enters the data warehouse, it is rarely modified. It is more about querying information.

According to the above definition, some people may simply consider a data warehouse as a large data storage mechanism and a static concept. In fact, a data warehouse is more like a process that involves data collection, sorting, and processing, generating the information required for decision-making, and finally providing the information to users who need the information, for them to make correct decisions to improve their business operations.

The key and requirement of a data warehouse is that it can accurately, securely and reliably retrieve data from the business system and convert the data into regular information for analysis and use by management personnel. Therefore, data warehousing is a dynamic concept. It is called data warehousing ).

SAP bi7.0 Introduction

Business Intelligence (SAP Bi) is a data warehouse solution of SAP company. The previous version of bi7.0 was called BW (Business Information Warehouse) Business Information Warehouse, it will be the data from the source system in the future (it can be sap R3, it can also be other transaction processing systems, text files,Database, Or other bw/BI systems), which are extracted, converted, and uploaded to the Bi Data Warehouse. Reports are presented to users in the form of Excel and web.

SAP bi7.0 Architecture

Fig 1.1

1.1 demonstrate the architecture of the SAP Bi platform, which includes the following parts:

1. ETL)

Automatically uploads, organizes, and integrates data from different data source systems;

2. Data Access tools

A data warehouse can store enough data to meet customers' business analysis and information decision-making needs;

3. Powerful front-end analysis tools

The report designer customizes reports so that customers can use uploaded data for analysis and decision-making, and provides two different query and analysis styles: Web format and Excel (analyzer) format;

4. Tools used to monitor system operation efficiency

The management platform provides job arrangement, monitoring, and effective management for data ETL and other execution processes, and can develop data processing logic that meets requirements.

Relationship between Bi system and ERP System

ERP systems are typical OLTP (online processing) systems. BI systems are OLAP (online analysis) systems with different focuses and different functions and tasks.

The ERP system is used to process business processes quickly and effectively, including the most primitive and detailed documents.

The Bi system performs online analysis of massive business data to generate decision information and knowledge. It not only contains detailed documents, but also summarizes and analyzes documents according to Decision-making requirements.

Description object of basic terms (infoobject) in SAP bi7.0)

Information Objects business evaluation objects and table fields are called Information Objects in Bi. They are the smallest unit in Bi and deploy information into various structures, information Objects are divided into two parts: feature and key value:

1. Characteristics

Information Objects in the primary data table, such as customers, suppliers, gas stations, and sales teams.

The system has the following special features:

Time featuresTime-related features: "fiscal period", "calendar year ",...

Unit featuresInternational unit "local currency" or "0 unit

TechnologyFeaturesFor example, Request No.

2. Key value figures

Key values are provided in the report, such as the sales quantity and amount.

Data storage object (DSO)

DSO (datastore objects) data storage objects are document-level business data or primary data storage points in Bi. Data in DSO can also be used for report usage analysis. There are three types of data storage objects: standard DSO, write-optimized DSO, and direct update of DSO.

Standard DSOIts structure includes the data queue to be activated, activated data, and change logs, which are used for data storage during data extraction and loading in the Bi system.

Write optimization DSOIts structure only contains the activated data. It features that the data loaded to it does not need to be manually activated and can be processed in the next step quickly.

Directly update DSOThis type of DSO data can come from reports and information sets, and cannot be provided by common data sources. Its structure only contains one form of data, therefore, the data is consistent with its data provider.

Infocube)

Infocube InformationCubeBody is a type of multi-dimensional information provider. From the report perspective, an infocube describes a complete business-oriented dataset, which can also be used for report analysis.

Fig 1.2

The information storage of information cubes is a star model structure, which shows a simple star model. The key indicators in the center and the surrounding features form a multidimensional analysis model; A table that stores key indicators is called a fact table. The numbers of surrounding features are stored in a dimension table, the description and hierarchy of features are associated with the SID table in the background by numbers. For detailed structure, see:

Fig 1.3

The model consists of an intermediate fact table and a dimension table. The fact table and dimension table are connected by a foreign key, in SAP Bi, dimension tables consist of business analysis objects such as customers, sales offices, and time. fact tables consist of dimension table IDs and key values such as sales volume and amount.

Compound cube (multicube)

Multi-cube composite cube is an information provider that facilitates the issuance of cross-module Reports and integrates multiple information providers (cubes, DSO, etc.). It does not contain any data, all of its data comes from its downstream information provider.

Data Source and information source

The data source provides the source of Bi data. Generally, it is a structure composed of logical fields in the source system. The Bi system obtains data through the ETL mechanism.

Information Source (infosource) Bi is composed of information objects. It corresponds to the Data Transmission Structure of multiple data sources and information providers. The data transmission path is: source System Data Source> information source> information provider.

Transmission rules, update rules, and conversion

The transmission rule (transfer rules) provides a logical link between the data source and the information source, allowing the ing, constant, or ABAP routine control of data fields to information objects, it can be used in the transmission of transaction data, attributes, text or layers

Update rules provide logical links between information sources and data targets, allowing ing between information objects and information objects, or controlling ABAP routines, it can only be used in features or key indicators of data targets

Transformations is used in bi7.0 to provide the logical link between the data source and the data target, or between the data provider and the data target. You can set up the control of constants or ABAP routines in the ing of information objects.

Data Stream

Fig 1.4

Shows the data flow in SAP bi7.0. The data extraction mechanism of SAP Bi uploads data from the source system data source in segments according to the customized plan, and uploads the data to PSA (persistent staging area, continuous segmented transmission area) and then uploads the data to the information provider DSO through the comparison of information sources and the cleaning and conversion of update rules, and finally enters the information cube to provide REPORT query and analysis.

Data transmission process

Data transmission process (DTS) is an object that determines how data is transmitted between two data storage objects, it is used to transmit data between two data storage objects in Bi according to the specified conversion and filter.

Data processing chain

Process chain is a processing queue customized for specific events in bi7.0. It has the advantage of automatic, visualized, and fully monitored processing of a series of events.