Unlock the Full Potential of SAP Datasphere: Your Essential Guide from SAP PRESS

[Geetha_Madhuri_Bobbili]

Introduction

Hello SAP Professionals,

I’m Geetha Madhuri Bobbili, an SAP Data and Analytics Senior Manager at Deloitte, where I lead initiatives leveraging SAP technologies to drive innovation and deliver impactful solutions to our esteemed clients. I’m thrilled to introduce my latest SAP PRESS publication, “Introducing SAP Datasphere”. This comprehensive resource offers insights into the functionalities and capabilities of SAP Datasphere, empowering you to navigate its complexities with confidence.

Through my experience, I've witnessed how SAP Datasphere revolutionizes data management by simplifying integration and preserving crucial business context—something often overlooked in traditional processes. One notable project with a global insurance company was a significant milestone for me. It highlighted SAP Datasphere's potential to empower organizations to become truly data-driven.

This journey has inspired me to delve deeper into this technology, explore its full capabilities, and share my insights with a broader audience. Writing this book is my way of giving back to the SAP community that has given me so much.

Bridging the Knowledge Gap

I wrote this book to fill a gap in the available learning materials for SAP Datasphere. Recognizing the need for practical insights and real-world scenarios, my goal is to empower SAP professionals with the knowledge to fully understand and utilize SAP Datasphere in their organizations. Through this book, I aim to equip professionals to excel in their roles and drive innovation.

What is SAP Datasphere

In today’s digital era, seamless access to critical business data is essential for any organization's transformation. Managing data across on-premise and cloud systems can be complex, requiring significant effort in extraction, rebuilding, and integration. Maintaining business context during data transfers to cloud data lakes is crucial due to their intricate structures.

SAP Datasphere, powered by SAP HANA Cloud, addresses these challenges by enabling rapid data movement while preserving essential business context through real-time and batch replications. It offers a unified platform with a revolutionary business data fabric architecture that consolidates critical data from various sources, simplifying decision-making processes and ensuring secure and scalable access to vital business data. SAP Datasphere is a cloud-based data warehouse solution that seamlessly harmonizes an organization's strategic data.

As a cornerstone in modern data management, SAP Datasphere enhances secure data handling, fosters innovation, and facilitates real-time connectivity and integration across systems, providing a unified view of an organization’s data.

What You’ll Discover

In this book, you’ll gain a thorough understanding of SAP Datasphere’s core components, data warehousing strategy, integration capabilities, data management techniques, and many more. Additionally, you’ll learn how to acquire, secure, prepare, and model data effectively through real-world scenarios, and consume data for analysis and reporting. Each section of the book is meticulously crafted to provide valuable insights and practical guidance while adhering to the page limit set by SAP PRESS (approximately 125 - 130 pages). I have ensured comprehensive coverage of each feature with detailed, step-by-step explanations.

Contents at a Glance

Chapter 1: Understanding SAP Datasphere

This chapter sets the foundation for the rest of the book by providing an overview of SAP Datasphere's capabilities and its potential business benefits. You'll explore the core components of SAP Datasphere, understand SAP's data warehousing strategy, and learn how to navigate the SAP Datasphere interface.

Chapter 2: Exploring SAP Datasphere Spaces

In this chapter, you'll dive into space management in SAP Datasphere. Learn how to create spaces, assign disk and in-memory storage, set priorities, and manage resources. The chapter explains how to monitor storage usage within spaces to ensure resource optimization and organize your data landscape effectively.

Chapter 3: Exploring SAP Datasphere Integration Options

This chapter describes the integration capabilities of SAP Datasphere. Discover how the platform simplifies data integration across various sources, including cloud, on-premise, SAP, non-SAP sources, and partner tools. Explore the process of creating, modifying, and verifying connections, as well as managing real-time replication for optimized data flow. By the end of this chapter, you'll have a comprehensive understanding of SAP Datasphere's integration options and their application in real-world scenarios.

Chapter 4: Acquiring Data with the Data Builder

Learn to import data from different sources, create and modify tables, work with data flows and transformation flows in this chapter. The chapter also covers using replication flows for efficient data copying and task chains for process automation.

Chapter 5: Data Preparation in the Data Builder

This chapter covers enabling currency conversion using TCUR* tables and views in SAP Datasphere. Discover how to share currency conversion tables across spaces. Explore combining, filtering, and enriching data using graphical and SQL views, as well as persisting view data for performance optimization. Learn about intelligent lookup for joining entities when traditional methods are impractical and creating entity-relationship (E/R) models.

Chapter 6: Securing Data with Data Access Controls

Introducing data access controls in SAP Datasphere for ensuring data security. Learn how to apply these controls to views or objects, restricting access based on specific rules. Explore creating and configuring data access controls, defining user criteria with permissions, and enforcing these criteria across multiple views.

Chapter 7: Data Modeling in the Data Builder

Enhance data entities with semantic information for broader accessibility in this chapter. Create fact entities for numerical analysis, dimension entities for data categorization, and text entities for multilingual translation. Focus on analytic models, crucial for data consumption in SAP Analytics Cloud, covering predefined measures, hierarchies, filters, parameters, and associations for effective data navigation.

Chapter 8: Data Modeling in the Business Builder

Guide through using the Business Builder tool to create, refine, and enrich data models in this chapter. Learn to create business entities, the foundation of analytical and reporting models sourced from the Data Builder. Cover fact models for simplified consumption model creation with predefined measures, attributes, and filters relevant to specific business contexts. Explore authorization scenarios for filtering data based on user context, concluding with the creation of consumption models vital for data consumption across SAP Analytics Cloud and other BI clients.

Chapter 9: Consuming Data Exposed by SAP Datasphere

Describe data consumption methods within SAP Datasphere, this chapter will educate on consuming data exposed as analytic models, perspectives, and views in SAP and non-SAP tools. Learn multiple data consumption methods, including live connections to SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP's native Add-in for Microsoft Excel.

Conclusion

I hope you find this book as insightful to read as I found it to write. To learn more and purchase the book, please visit the SAP PRESS website. 

As you embark on this educational journey, I welcome your thoughts, questions, or feedback. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. If you find the book valuable, please consider sharing it within your professional network.

Together, we can continue to learn, grow, and innovate in the ever-evolving field of SAP Data and Analytics!!