universe designer & web intelligence

SAP Business Objects Training

Welcome

Day 2 - Dated 05-Jan-2010

Contents

1. Universe Designer Overview

2. Building universes

3. SAP Meta-data in OLAP universes

4. Optimizing and Managing universes

5. Web Intelligence Overview

6. Web Intelligence Report Design

Universe Designer Overview

In order to report data using Business Objects reporting tools, we need to create universe on top of the underlying database.

Business Objects provides a tool known as Designer to create universe on top of any database.

Universe act as a semantic layer. Connection parameters for one or more database middleware.

The role of a universe is to provide an easy to use and understand interface for non technical Web Intelligence users to run queries against a database to create reports and perform data analysis


As the universe designer, you use Designer to create objects that represent database structures, for example columns and database functions, that users need to access and query, to get the information necessary to meet their business requirements.

A universe contains the following structures: - Classes ,Objects

Classes

A class is a logical grouping of objects within a universe. It represents a category of objects. The name of a class should indicate the category of the objects that it contains. A class can be divided hierarchically into subclasses.


Objects

An object is a named component that maps to data or a derivation of data in the database. The name of an object should be drawn from the business vocabulary of the targeted user group

Required skills and knowledge

A universe designer should have the following skills and level of technical knowledge

- Ability to analyze user needs

- Database knowledge

- Structured Query Language (SQL)


Tasks of the universe designer

- Conducting user needs analysis

- Designing and creating the universe

- Distributing the universe

- Maintaining the universe

Building Universe

1. Data Access driver

2. Connection and login parameters

3. Object creation

Building Universe – Data Access drivers

A Data Access driver is the software layer that connects a universe to your middleware. When you create a new connection, you select the appropriate Data Access driver for the RDBMS middleware that you use to connect to the target RDBMS.

For Example- SAP BW

- SQL

- Oracle

- MS Excel

Building Universe-Connection and login parameters

Types of Connections

- Personal

- Secured

- Shared

Login parameters

- User Name

- Password

- Use database credentials associated with BO user account

Building Universe

Design Schema - A graphical representation of database structure.

Create Joins

A join is a condition that links the data in separate but related tables. The tables usually have a parent-child relationship. If a query does not contain a join, the database returns a result set that contains all possible combinations of the rows in the query tables. Such a result set is known as a Cartesian product and is rarely useful.

Create Cardinalities – Similarity between two tables

Cardinality is a property of a join that describes how many rows in one table match rows in another table.

- One to one

- Many to one

- One to many

Building Universe

SAP Meta-data in OLAP Universes

Universes enable business users to access and analyze data stored in a relational database and OLAP cubes. This is core business intelligence (BI) technology that frees users from IT while ensuring correct results.

When creating an OLAP universe based on an SAP BW (Business Warehouse) data source, you can build the universe based directly on an Info Cube/MultiCube, or based on a BW Query enabled on top of any Info Provider. An Info Provider can be:

• an InfoCube

• a MultiCube or Multi-InfoProvider

• an Operational Data Store (ODS)

• an InfoSet


SAP BI Element Universe Object

Dimension Class

Characteristic Subclass with dimension and detail objects

Characteristic with hierarchy BI Query: Subclass containing dimension and detail objects for each hierarchy level in the currently defined hierarchy

Key Figure Measure object in the class

Navigational attribute

Subclass with dimension and detail objects (identical to characteristic)

Display Attribute Detail object for the dimension

Optimizing and Managing universes

Optimizing universes

- Using aggregate tables

- Using @Functions

- Using external strategies to customize universe creation

- Using analytic functions

Managing universe

- Deploying universes

- Setting access restrictions on a universe

- Linking universes

- Managing users and logins

Web Intelligence Overview

Web Intelligence is a powerful analysis tool for creating ad-hoc reporting. It allows business user to analyze data from data warehouse. The reports created in WebI (.WID format) are accessed through BO portal InfoView.

WebI Rich Client- SAP introduces WebI Rich client to fill the DeskI functionality in WebI. It is a standalone Microsoft Windows Application to work with WebI documents off line without any InfoView connection and Application server installed. So business user can now work with WebI on line and off line

Web Intelligence Report Design

You can create or edit Web Intelligence documents using one of several tools:

- Java Report Panel

- Query – HTML

- HTML Report Panel

You can also use Web Intelligence Rich Client to create WebI Documents. You can work with following modes.

- Connected

- Offline

- Standalone


There are a number of reasons for using Web Intelligence Rich Client to work with WID documents:

- You want to work with Web Intelligence documents but you are unable to connect to a CMS (while traveling, for example).

- You want to improve calculation performance: Web Intelligence Rich Client performs calculations locally, rather than on the server, and local calculations can perform better than server calculations.

- You want to work with Web Intelligence documents without installing a CMS or application server.


According to your security rights in the CMS, you can do the following:

- Import documents from the CMS

- Import universes from the CMS

- Open local documents

- Create documents

- Edit documents

- Refresh documents

- Save documents locally

- Export documents to the CMS


To create a new document in Web Intelligence Rich Client in Offline mode, you need to have a connection server installed on your computer.

1. Click Document > New.

2. In the New Document dialog box, click Universe and then Next.

3. In the Universe dialog box, select a universe.

The query panel opens to let you build your report.

Web Intelligence functions

Web Intelligence divides functions into the following categories:

- Aggregate

- Character

- Date and Time

- Document

- Data Provider

- Logical

- Numeric

- Misc

Web Intelligence Features

Using alerters to highlight results

Merging dimensions from multiple data providers

Ranking data in Web Intelligence reports

Tracking changes in data

Using sections, breaks and sorts

Filtering reports

Drilling on report data

Web Intelligence Features

Filtering data using prompts

Displaying data in tables

Displaying data in free-standing cells

Displaying data in charts

Formatting numbers and dates

Thank You

Questions