Diversified Semantic Layer

This week I had the opportunity to attend some of the Mastering SAP Technologies 2013 sessions, held in Melbourne Australia, as well as the accompanying SAP Inside Track.

You can find some great coverage of the SITMEL and SAP Tech conference by Custodio de Oliveira here and bySimon Kemp here.

As part of the conference, the keynote was presented by Irfan Khan, who is the Head of Solution Management for Database and Data Warehousing as well as the Chief Technology Officer for the SAP Database & Technologies pillar.

Irfan's keynote focused on 'What Is Driving Technology at SAP?', and ranged from discussion on programming for cache misses at the hardware level 20 years ago, to allelles and genome sequencing with HANA.

Later that day, Irfan gave me some of his time to sit down for an interview about his keynote and the Real-Time Data Platform (RTDP), which you can watch below.

Here are the key points in the video:

01:15   Key messages in Mastering SAP Technologies 2013 keynote

01:55   Overview of the RTDP

03:35   Timeframe to implement the RTDP

05:30   Foundational technologies underlying the RTDP

08:10   Common unified management and governance tool for RTDP

09:10   Implications for new application development with the RTDP

11:15   Implications of the RTDP for BI and DW professionals

Hi everyone,

Welcome to the sixth and final episode in our Diversified Semantic Layer podcast series about Business Warehouse for the BusinessObjects community.  Once again I'm joined by Ethan Jewett, a fellow SAP Mentor.

In this episode, we will examine the how we can extend our data mart with new data from a different source system, the methods available to do this, and what benefits it provides for Enterprise Data Warehousing.

We hope you enjoy watching.

Joshua Fletcher

Hi everyone,

Welcome to the next episode in our Diversified Semantic Layer podcast series about Business Warehouse for the BusinessObjects community.  Once again I'm joined by Ethan Jewett, a fellow SAP Mentor.

In this episode, we will examine the improvements made to the Bex query in Episode 4, such as navigational attributes, hierarchies and units of measure.

Our next episode will see us bringing in a second data source to recreate the requirements of an Enterprise Data Warehouse.

We hope you enjoy watching.

Joshua Fletcher

A few short months ago we had the tremendous opportunity to talk on stage at the ASUG News Studio during ASUG SBOUC 2012.  It was awesome.

ASUG News was kind enough to share that video with us.  We've dumped it on to our channel for your viewing glory.

Hi everyone,

Welcome to the next episode in our Diversified Semantic Layer podcast series about Business Warehouse for the BusinessObjects community.  Once again I'm joined by Ethan Jewett, a fellow SAP Mentor.

In this episode, we connect to our new Bex query using many of the BusinessObjects tools, including Web Intelligence, Crystal Reports and Dashboard Designer (Xcelsius).  We finish up by walking through creating a multi-source universe on top of the Multiprovider, which will allow us to query BW from Visual Intelligence and Explorer.

Our next episode will continue on optimising and explaining different features of BW.

We hope you enjoy watching.

Joshua Fletcher

Hi everyone,

Welcome to the next episode in our Diversified Semantic Layer podcast series about Business Warehouse for the BusinessObjects community.  Once again I'm joined by Ethan Jewett, a fellow SAP Mentor.

In this episode, we create a MultiProvider on top of the Sales DSO, and then create a simple Bex query on top of the MultiProvider.  We also discuss some specific BW features that don't exist in the BOBJ portfolio which are particularly beneficial in data warehousing.  We finish the podcast by creating an OLAP connection in the CMC, and connect SAP BusinessObjects Analysis for OLAP to our new Bex query.

Our next episode will cover connecting additional BusinessObjects tools to the Bex query.

We hope you enjoy watching.

Joshua Fletcher

Hi everyone,

Welcome to the next episode in our Diversified Semantic Layer podcast series about Business Warehouse for the BusinessObjects community.  Once again I'm joined by Ethan Jewett, a fellow SAP Mentor from Wisconsin.

In this episode, we have connected Data Services 4.0 with Business Warehouse 7.03 using an RFC call, and load sales data into a Persistent Staging Area (PSA) using Data Services jobs.  We also create InfoObjects for the relevant characteristics and key figures in our sales data, which we then load into a DataStore Object (DSO).  Along the way, we (Ethan most of the time) discuss where BW has good and not-so-good features.

Our next episode will cover creating a Bex query on our DSO, connecting the BusinessObjects tools to the Bex query, and then starting to load in our second disparate data source, to begin the process of building an Enterprise Data Warehouse.

We hope you enjoy watching.

Joshua Fletcher

Hi everyone,

Welcome to another Diversified Semantic Layer podcast series.

I'm excited to be joined by Ethan Jewett, a fellow SAP Mentor from Wisconsin.  This podcast series focuses on explaining SAP Business Warehouse for the classic BusinessObjects community, and aims to show by example how Business Warehouse can be utilised as an Enterprise Data Warehouse, even without a dependent SAP ERP system.

Over several podcast episodes, Ethan and myself will build a BW system with two separate data sources, and begin building the foundations for an Enterprise Data Warehouse.  We will leverage BusinessObjects technologies such as Data Services, and the BusinessObjects Enterprise platform, to show how the BW and BusinessObjects can work together.  Lastly, we will discuss how BW has specific functionality which can add many benefits to data warehouse projects.

We hope you enjoy the series, and please feel free to comment and ask questions which we can incorporate into the series.

Joshua Fletcher

Below are the links that Ethan references in the podcast:

We are fresh off the SBOUC truck still and chewing through the content.  We had an idea for this year's SBOUC, and that was to find out what people loved most about SBOUC and what their favorite BusinessObjects conference moment has been.  This mashup tells the tale.

Josh sits down with a new friend, Clint Vosloo from BI In The Box, South Africa, to do a Sybase IQ Overview. In this episode, they install a base install of Sybase IQ, do some initial configuration, load in some BIG data and run a few queries.

You asked for it.  The team at the Diversified Semantic Layer as come through for you.  It is finally here (and will be available in 64 bit as soon as that goes GA).

This thing has legs.

The DSLayer crew shows some international (un)love for Deski and the Import Wizard to celebrate this holiday season.  We only did this to make up for the scrubbed 2010 episode.

Greg goes into new territory here with a walkthrough of using the SAP Quick Sizer to design a new SAP BusinessObjects BI4 environment.

As a follow on to the last video on data profiling, Eric demonstrates a command line argument for the IDT that improves data profiling capabilities.

The exact argument to enable this capability in the IDT:

-debug idt.options

Results may vary, use at your own risk :-)

Josh walks through a step-by-step process to configure SAP BusinessObjects BI4 to use Active Directory single sign-on. You can also view the step-by-step instructions at Josh's blog found at Geek2Live.net.

Greg and Nic Smith sat down at SAP TechEd to show some great analytics delivered on an iPad via Explorer Mobile and HANA.  Now with over 200,000 downloads? Good stuff.  We like it.

In this video Josh walks through part 1 of a BI4 end-to-end demo that he recently presented at the Mastering Business Intelligence with SAP South Africa conference. He shows how to create a simple universe in the Information Design Tool, a simple Web Intelligence report, and finishes up with a simple Crystal Report.

In this video, Eric reviews the finer points of data profiling directly within the Information Design Tool as a part of SAP BusinessObjects BI4.

Josh revisits installing not only the BI4 platform (on Windows), but also dives into Data Services 4, part of the EIM 4 suite.

Josh and Eric start our latest podcast series to demonstrate how to create your very own, personalized, unsupported SAP BusinessObjects BI4 Linux box.

Feel free to stop by iTunes to subscribe, or go for a direct download.

Play it now:

Part 1:

Part 2: