SAP Business Objects

Tuesday, March 22, 2016

SAP Design Studio Overview

Why SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio?

Because it can help you quickly and cost-effectively create data visualizations, dashboards, and BI apps based on the exact requirements of decision makers. Make it easy for users to digest petabytes of information, understand root causes, and gain a holistic view of the enterprise.

Use pre-built templates and guided steps to design faster with professional results
Customize visualizations, dashboards, and apps with a flexible SDK
Directly connect to SAP BW, SAP HANA, and semantic layers for trusted KPIs
Save time and money by re-using data assets in queries, InfoCubes, and SAP HANA
Work in a flexible and scalable Eclipse-based design environment

Universe Design Best Practices

I believe that the universe is the foundation of the BusinessObjects system. With poor universe design, required reports are often difficult or even impossible in some cases.

Poor universe design can also lead to wrong data, non-optimal SQL generation, incompatible objects and/or Cartesian products (or very wrong data).

I've categorized the best practices into two groups, End-User and Cosmetic methods, as well as Functional or Optimization methods.

Geo Maps in Web Intelligence

Geo maps allow you to create charts that take advantage of geographical data your reports contain. The implementation of these geo maps in Web Intelligence is similar to the one in SAP Explorer and SAP Lumira. Note that geo maps are for the moment not supported in shared elements.

Limit the number of Data Providers Used

Don not add more than 10 Data Providers per document.
Data Providers run serially, so runtimes add up
Refresh time and merging of dimensions can cause some big delays on the Processing Server side

Using a Data Warehouse to consolidate sources and ETL tools to produce better reporting sources is a better practice.