The core task of SAP Data Services is to support companies in dealing with fragmented data. The system provides a wide range of features for this purpose. The functional areas are as follows:
Let us take a closer look at these areas in the following.
1. data integration and data transformation
SAP DS is a proven data integration and data transformation tool. Its core task is therefore to connect, harmonize and process structured and unstructured data from different data sources.
The solution offers several methods for converting and providing the data:
SAP Data Services thus supports not only batch processing, the traditional approach to data transformation. Real-time services can also be used. They allow data services to be queried with defined workflows and immediate responses.
The transformation of data can be performed in parallel (for several sources simultaneously), thus achieving a particularly high data throughput rate.
2. data quality management
Another important area of application for SAP DS is data quality. As a central platform, the solution is suitable for making quality transparent and monitoring it across systems. This also makes quality problems and correlations visible that were previously hidden.
The software also provides information on how quality defects affect downstream applications and systems. All these aspects are visualized on clearly arranged dashboards.
In addition, SAP Data Services comes with predefined, customizable workflows for analyzing, cleansing, standardizing, and enriching data. These features make SAP DS suitable for both a one-off data cleansing project and continuous quality assurance.
3. data profiling
Data profiling is a function that can also be assigned to data quality management. It is an automated analysis that can be used to detect quality problems.
Among other things, data profiling provides information about frequency distributions, invalid values, minimum and maximum values and patterns in existing data sets. This makes it possible to identify patterns and anomalies in a database. This method is especially helpful for the early detection of skewed data.
4. analysis of text data
As mentioned, SAP Data Services also allows the processing of unstructured data. This property is particularly important for the analysis of text data (text data processing).
The method allows key terms, facts, moods, feelings and trends to be extracted from more than 200 different file and text formats, thereby gaining valuable insights. Just a few examples are press releases, social networks, e-mails and blogs.
5. Change Data Capture (CDC)
CDC is used to immediately detect data changes in a source database and to update the target system on this basis.
Thus, the entire data stock does not have to be updated permanently. Instead, only new or changed data records are transferred. This results in significant savings of computing resources.
6. integration with other SAP products
Data Services works together with a whole range of other SAP products from the Enterprise Information Management (EIM) sector. These include, for example: