History of SAP BODS

History of SAP BODS/ Evolution of SAP BODS:

SAP BusinessObjects Data Services was not directly developed by SAP Company. It was acquired from BusinessObjects Company and BusinessObjects acquired it from Acta Technology Inc. 

Acta Technology Inc., headquartered in Mountain View, CA was provider of first real time data integration platform. The two software products provided by Acta were an ETL tool, named as Data Integration (DI) tool also known as ‘Actaworks’ and a Data Management orData Quality (DQ) tool.

BusinessObjects, a French company, world’s leading provider of Business Intelligence (BI) solutions acquired Acta Technology Inc. in the year 2002. BusinessObjects rebranded the two products of Acta as BusinessObjects Data Integration (BODI) tool and BusinessObjects Data Quality (BODQ) tool.

In the year 2007, SAP, legend in ERP solutions, acquired BusinessObjects and renamed the products as SAP BODI and SAP BODQ.  Later in the year 2008 SAP integrated both software products into a single end to end software product and named it as SAP BusinessObjects Data Services (BODS) which provides both data integration and data management solutions. In the earlier versions of SAP BODS text data processing solution is also included with it.

 Why SAP BODS?

In the present market there are many ETL tools which dose Extraction, Transformation and Loading tasks like SAP BODS, Informatica, IBM InfoSphere Data Stage, Abinitio, Oracle Warehouse Builder (OWB) etc.

Let’s look over why SAP BODS has got much importance in the present world’s market,

• Firstly, it is a SAP product, as SAP is serving 70% of present world’s market and it is tightly integrated with any database.
• SAP BODS is a single product which delivers Data Integration, Data Quality, Data profiling and Text data processing solutions.
• SAP Data Services can Move, Unlock and govern enterprise data effectively.
• SAP Data Services Cost-effectively delivers its solutions and is single window application with complete easy to use GUI (Graphical User Interface).

 

Architecture of SAP BusinessObjects Data Services (BODS)

SAP BusinessObjects Data Services is a data warehousing product that delivers a single enterprise-class software solution for data integration (ETL), data management (data quality) and text data processing.

• Data Integrationis the Extraction, Transformation and Loading (ETL) technologyof enterprise data between heterogeneous sources and targets.

Sources and Targets can be SAP Applications (ERP, CRM etc.), SAP BW, SAP HANA, Any Relational Database (MS SQL Server, Oracle etc.), Any File (Excel Workbook, Flat file, XML, HDFS etc.), unstructured text, Web services etc.

ETL technology of SAP BODS can be done in both Batch mode and Real time mode data integration.

• Data Managementor Data Qualityprocess Cleanses, Enhances, Matches and Consolidates the enterprise data to get an accurate or quality form of data.
• Text Data Processing analyzes and extracts specific information (entities or facts) from large volumes of unstructured text like emails, paragraphs etc,

Architecture:

            The following figure outlines the architecture of standard components of SAP BusinessObjects Data Services.

Note: On top of SAP BODS, a full SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform or SAP BusinessObjects Information Platform Services (IPS) should be installed for User and Rights security management from 4.x versions. Data Services relies on CMC (Central Management Console) for Authentication and Security features. In earlier versions it was done is Management console of SAP BODS.

BODS Designer:

SAP BusinessObjects Data Services Designer is a developer or designer tool. It is an easy-to-use graphical user interface wheredevelopers can design objects that consist of data mappings, transformations, and control logic.

 Repository

                Repository is the space in a database server which stores the metadata of the objects used in SAP BusinessObjects Data Services. Each repositorymust be registered in the Central Management Console (CMC) and associated with one or more Job Servers which run the jobs you create.

There are three types of repositories used with SAP BODS:

• Local repository:

A local repository stores the metadata of all the objects (like projects, jobs, work flows, and data flows) and source/target metadata defined by developers in SAP BODS Desinger.

• Central repository:

A central repository is used for multi-user development and version management of objects. Developers can check objects in and out of their local repositories to a shared object library provided by central repository. The central repository preserves all versions of an application’s objects, so you can revert to a previous version if needed.

• Profiler repository:

A profiler repository is used to store all the metadata of profiling tasks performed in SAP BODS designer.

Where, CMS repository is used to store the metadata of all the tasks done in CMC of SAP BO BI platform or IPS.

Information Steward Repository is used to store the metadata of profiling tasks and objects defined in SAP Information Steward.

Job Server

The SAP BusinessObjects Data Services Job Server retrieves the job information from its respected repository and starts the data engine to process the job.

The Job Server can move data in either batch or real-time mode and uses distributed query optimization, multi-threading, in-memory caching, in-memory data transformations, and parallel processing to deliver high data throughput and scalability.

Access Server

The SAP BusinessObjects Data Services Access Server is a real-time, request-reply message broker that collects message requests, routes them to a real-time service, and delivers a message reply within a user-specified time frame.

Management Console

SAP BusinessObjects Data Services Management Console is the Web-based application with the following properties.

Administration, Impact and Lineage Analysis, Operational Dashboard, Auto Documentation, Data Validation and Data Quality Reports.