SAP Data Services Overview

What is SAP Data Services

SAP Data Services is a data integration and transformation software application for data integration, Transformation, Data quality, Data profiling and text data processing from the heterogeneous source into a target database or data warehouse, SAP Data services are used. It is an ETL tool that gives a single enterprises level solution.

SAP Data Sevices helps various IT organization to increase their operational efficiency with a single solution in order to improve data quality and get access to various heterogeneous sources and application.

Features of Data Services

Multi-users are supported by data services.
Comprehensive administrative tools and reporting tool are found in data services.
High-performance parallel transformations are provided by data services.
With web-service based application, SAP BODS is very flexible.
Language scripting with rich sets of functions can be done by data services.
With the Trigger-based technology, Data Services can integrate with SAP LT Replication Server (SLT). To every SAP or non-SAP source table, SLT adds delta-capabilities. This permits for utilizing data capturing for change and for transferring the Source table delta data.
With dashboards and process auditing, data validation is done.
It helps in built-in profiling, viewing data and debugging.
Any Databases with bulk loading and changes data capture
It provides administration tool that have scheduling capabilities as well as monitoring/dashboards.
Broad source and target are supported by SAP BODS
Any Applications (e.g. SAP).
Files: fixed width, comma delimited, COBOL, XML, Excel.

SAP Data Services Architecture

The following components are found in Data Services Architecture:

Central Repository - For repositories configurations to jobs servers, security management, version control and object sharing, this is used.
Designer â€“For Creating Project, Job, workflow, data flow and run, this is used.
Local repository (for creating change and start jobs, Workflow, data flow, this is used).
Job server & engine â€“ To manage the jobs, this is used.
Access Server â€“ To execute the real-time jobs created by developers in the repositories, this is used.

Component of Data Services

The following components are found in Data Services-

1. Designer- To create, test, and execute a job that populates a data warehouse, this development tool is used.

By selecting an icon in a source-to-target flow diagram, it allows the developer to create objects and configure them.

To create an application by specifying workflows and data flows, it can be used.

Go to Start Menu -> All Programs -> SAP Data Services (4.2 here) -> Data Service Designer in order to open Data Service Designer.

2. Job Server- This application serves as an interface to the engine and Data Services Suite and launches the data services processing engine.

3. Engine- The individual jobs which are defined in the application are executed by the Data Service engine.

4. Repository- The designer pre-defined objects and user defined objects (source and target metadata, transformation rules) are stored in this database.

Two types of Repository are there:

Local Repository (The Designer and Job Server uses this type of Repository).
Central Repository (For object sharing and version control, this type of Repository is used.)

5. Access Server- Between web applications, data services job server and engines, access server passes messages.

6. Administrator - The browser-based administration of data services resources are provided by Web Administrator. The details are given belowâ€“

Configure, start and stop real-time services.
Schedule monitor and execute batch jobs.
Configure Job Server, Access Server, and Repository usage.
Manage users.
Publish batch jobs and real-time services via Web services
Configure and manage adapters.