What is SAP Data Services?
SAP Data Services is a data integration and transformation software application that enables organizations to capture more meaning and value from their structured and unstructured data. With this single enterprise-class solution, businesses can integrate data, improve data quality, create data profiles and process text data. In doing so, they can transform and deliver high-quality trusted data from numerous heterogeneous sources and applications to critical business processes to help improve decision-making.
SAP Data Services enterprise data management software is part of the SAP Business Technology Platform. It offers intuitive interfaces and advanced features for data integration and quality enhancements.
SAP Data Services can be deployed on premises to facilitate the unification and analysis of critical on-premises data. That said, it also provides intuitive tools to unify data in the cloud or from big data sources and discover useful insights from those data repositories. The data can be operational, analytical, geographic or machine-generated.
Key features and capabilities of SAP Data Services
SAP Data Services provides an intuitive user interface and blueprints that make it easy to standardize, correct and match data. The data may be structured or unstructured, sourced from SAP or third-party sources, or reside within on-premises or cloud enterprise solutions. Third-party resources such as Microsoft Azure, big data services and Apache Hive can be used to extend big data and cloud support in SAP Data Services.
From its single interface and through single sign-on, business users can design, test, debug, run and monitor data integration and quality. This approach reduces duplication and helps to improve the quality and relevance of the data. Users can also identify and extract untapped relationships and patterns in data for enhanced analysis and decision-making. Furthermore, built-in address and data cleansing features reveal quality issues so organizations can standardize their intelligence to develop a single version of the truth.
The numerous data integration and processing capabilities of SAP Data Services enable businesses to access their data from anywhere and at any time. Any data source can be connected to the software, which supports content across 31 languages plus 220 file and text formats including text, HTML, XML, PDF and Microsoft Word. From these data sources and types, they can extract everything from facts and relationships to the sentiments of key entities (people, dates, places, etc.) and even specific linguistic artifacts in multiple languages.
Organizations can also access mainframe data sources by working with SAP partners, connect to third-party data sources like Microsoft SQL Server or IBM Db2 with native support, and implement available adapters for Apache Hive, HTTP, JDBC, JMS, MongoDB and Open Data Protocol.
Built-in native connectors support universal data access and integration, allowing businesses to easily integrate their various enterprise data sources and SAP/third-party targets. Additional connector options are available by orchestrating data flows from SAP Data Services through the SAP Data Intelligence solution.
SAP Data Services integrates seamlessly with applications in the SAP Business Suite. It can also read data based on programming languages, including SAP's proprietary language ABAP and SAP extractors, plus IDoc, BAPI and remote function call.
A centralized business rule repository improves data governance and supports the transformation of all types of data. It also simplifies application maintenance and, in conjunction with object reuse and intuitive transformations, improves developer productivity. In addition, user-defined changes and customer functions extend the solution's existing capabilities, so users can enrich all their customer and operational information assets and deliver ready-to-use data transformations.
The software includes dashboards that visually depict data quality issues. Through these visualizations, business users can understand the impact of quality issues across downstream systems or applications and take appropriate steps to build trust in their data assets.
SAP Data Services includes many more features to improve data integration, governance and quality management, including the following:
- Parallel data processing, grid computing and bulk data loading to accommodate high-volume needs.
- Built-in intelligent optimizer to convert data flows using extract, transform and load (ETL) processes, allowing the use of SAP HANA for optimum processing performance.
- Replicate, transform and load (RTL) mechanisms to fine-tune data replication and transformation.
- Built-in support for data encryption and masking to secure data access, keep sensitive data confidential and maintain uncompromised data relevance.
- Web-based management console and impact lineage information to simplify daily operations.
- Custom dictionary allows businesses to specify their own entities list and manage name variations.
- Integration with other technology systems via web services, Java or .NET APIs.
Benefits of SAP Data Services
The main benefit of SAP Data Services software is that it extracts useful and timely information from raw data and then provides this information to businesses, helping them to make better decisions and drive better outcomes. With SAP Data Services, any organization can gain contextual insights from its data and access a comprehensive, single source of truth for business decision-making.
The application includes numerous features to standardize, enrich and match operational and customer data. This not only helps to correct quality issues, but also improves information management. Furthermore, it delivers ready-to-use transformations to all types of data (customer, vendor, material, product, etc.) and for various business processes and functional units.
Flexibility is another benefit of SAP Data Services as the application can take in and unify data of many different types from many different sources. Its intuitive tools integrate all these various data assets to build connections and facilitate the discovery of key business insights.
Who can use SAP Data Services?
SAP Data Services is useful for many different deployment scenarios and user groups.
For example, business users can access, create and edit Data Services projects and reports. Numerous specialized tools and applications are available for those use cases, such as Data Services Designer, Data Services Workbench and Data Services Management Console.
IT departments can also use SAP Data Services and its data and system management tools, which may help IT optimize the system and its functionalities for data integration, quality and cleansing.
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