SAP Data Services Reviews

The easy integration with SAP Systems and the possibility to create a dataflow which is executed directly in the SAP system source.

With the dataflows created in Dataservices, the customer could load and consolidate data from three different offices (USA, Europe and Argentina) using the same dataflows for every company.

We used a different repository for every consultant and it created problems to maintain the final version of each dataflow in every user. I think there should exist a common repository (as well as in BO reporting suite tools) and give the different accesses via authorization roles.

I used it for 10 months.

The biggest problem was the maintenance of difference repositories.

The stability problems were caused by hardware configuration. My doubt is if Dataservice is difficult to configure or there was a lack of knowledge in the Basis team.

No, we didn't. Actually the dataflows constructed were completely scalable.

No, in that project we only used BO Dataservices.

I think it is easy to use. When we started to use it we had never worked with Dataservices and we could adapt to it easily because the main functions are similar to other tools.

The implementation was with a vendor team. Actually I was the project manager of the vendor and the level of expertise in ETL projects was high but it was our first experience with DataServices.

We only had the net margin of the project construction and it was about 15%.

As the person in charge of the consultancy, we didn’t have costs.

Before working with Dataservices I had worked with other solutions, but in this project we had no choice of another tool. Anyway, I think that Dataservices was a good choice because every source was SAP.

From my point of view, Dataservices is a good ETL choice if there are SAP systems in the sources or the targets (it can help to make BW transformations much easier). In general I would say that it is very important to have a good source and destination definition before implementing anything, as well as in any other ETL tool.

• Data warehousing project (with CDC or comparison table to update our histories).
• Four sources: SQL Server, Oracle, SAP ECC, Excel file.
• One target: Azure SQL Data Warehouse.
• Complex transformation to load the Data Warehouse (good and simple optimization).

• It's very simple to build a data flow.
• The development is faster than SSIS or Talend.
• Impact analysis is very useful to know who used this KPI (the report on the user that had access to this report).
• Profiling data is very useful to know the interesting fields.

• Portability of development (you can change your source/target from Oracle to SQL without changing your code).
• Web console monitoring.
• Auto-documentation.
• Simple toolbox with all you need.

• Development with web tool (today is with client tool).
• Connection to Active Directory to extract user and group.
• A PaaS cloud service (today is on-premise).
• Better connection to SAP BW.

Our primary use is for storing incidents and all of the financial information that accompany them.

We do maintenance on buildings and our customers call if there is a problem. Each time a call comes in we log the incident, solve the problem, and later invoice the customer.

The most valuable feature is the logging capability. We use it for logging incidents.

The interface is not quite user-friendly and is in need of improvement. 

In the next release of this solution, I would like to have a planning tool.

I have been using SAP Data Services for two years.

With respect to stability, we have not had any problems.

We have not had issues with scalability.

We have our own technical support group, so I have not been in contact with SAP for support.

We are currently evaluating ServiceNow to see if it meets our needs and has a better user interface.

This is not a solution I recommend for incident management. SAP works well for the financial side of the business, but for anybody who is researching solutions for incident management, I suggest that they use another product.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

The fact that it's built on SQL, makes it easy to write code. Also, the database and the connection are quite smooth. 

The solution lacks user-friendly features. Compared to other integration tools I've used before, it's less user-friendly and the built-in features just aren't sufficient. 

The description of error messages isn't extensive, although they do point out the problems. With other solutions, like Talend, I was able to use the debugger to get directly to the problem, but with SAP Data Services the debugger is not working. I'm not sure if it's a problem with the version specifically, but I'm using it in an enterprise environment and I can't do an upgrade.

The query feature does not allow a lot of flexibility in building the code. They need to make progress with this feature as well.

In future releases, I'd like to see the integration of a big data solution within SAP Data Services. I don't know if they offer that right now. The version I have is quite basic. If I was able to use more data sources with other software, and have the solution be more compliant with more data source types and big data sources, that would be helpful.

I would rate the stability seven out of ten. It's good, but it's not the best.

I wasn't part of the initial setup, so I can't speak directly to the implementation of the solution.

We are using the on-premises version of the solution. We work on the enterprise version and have a few hundred users.

I like the platform. It's quite robust. It's just there are little improvements that could make the solution better, but it's quite a good tool.

I would rate the solution seven out of ten.

Data migration and data quality.

It offers short development time and pre-built processes.

Ease of development.

Big data, real-time connectivity without the need to use SAP Replication Server

Excellent too

Excellent, you build a network of Job Servers to balanced the execution load

Local teams always available, plus direct support from Walldorf if required

I'm using SAP Data Services since it was an OEM product in Cognos in 1998

Data Services itself, none. The must difficult (kind of) ids to setup the databases connectivity for sources and targets.

In-House

Lower time to put applications in Production

The SAP Data Services EE License has all the additional products for enterprise wide data delivery, like Information Steward, Event Stream Processing, etc.

None, because other products cannot connect to SAP generating ABAP code to access pool and cluster tables

I am Microstrategy BI developer with 6 years experience and with 1 year experience on SAP Data Services.

Out of 5, I would give SAP Data Services technical support a 4.5. The technical support from SAP was quick and technically very clear. The way the issues are being reviewed and the response we receive are great.

The first ETL tool being implemented is SAP Data Services and it was implemented during 2008.

The product was implemented by a third party consulting company. The implementation was good from a technical perspective, but there were few flaws in the business logic which the third party consulting team should have gained from the in-house business analysts.

Since I recently joined a year ago, I am not sure whether any other tool was evaluated along with this ETL tool.

I would advise implementing SAP Data services using a Unix platform rather than a windows platform.

ETL is very useful. We use Data Services not only with data warehouse development but also integration with other 3rd parties and external data.

We have integration with 30 different systems now. Business users manual data-entry load has decreased, and data between different systems are consistent in almost-real time.

We can develop time-based, visualized analyses with our BI platform, and four years ago, business users had to prepare their complex records in Excel every time they needed data reports. Now they only need to refresh reports. On the other hand, business users were only able to query data four years ago, but now their visions are changing and they are now performing data mining and forecast analyses.

Data mining and more visualized reports are the next steps.

We had to deal with data quality problems.

It has inadequate data analysis and data profiling, which has increased testing and user acceptance duration.

BO Web Intelligence, v4.0 is more unstable than XI v3.x. We’ll upgrade to v4.1 in Q3.

No, we did not.

Setup was straightforward, but the customization and implementation process was complex.

We started with a vendor-partner, but now we have in-house team and still get consultancy advice from the partner.

• Cognos
• Microsoft SSIS
• SSRS

First, perform an analysis of your business users' requirements.

The data quality and your data warehouse models are the most important parts of a BI project. Design the model from both business requirements and source data. Make sure you involve business users from the beginning and explain the advantages of business intelligence to the data life-cycle well. Assign a short and attractive name to the web site and/or tool that users can remember easily and will like.

1. Impact and Lineage analysis.
2. Auto Documentation.
3. Recovery of jobs.
4. Text Data Processing.

I've done a migration project (from OWB to BODS) in Singapore. The reason customer opted for BODS over OWB was automated trigger E-mail when job fails and the recovery of the jobs from the point it failed in the last execution. Also, when loading data from flat files, once the data loading from a file is complete BODS is capable enough to call any batch files to move the processed files to another location after completion.

When working with custom functions, many times it fails to execute (from 4.0 onwards) because of the data types mismatch errors. This has to be corrected.

More than 6 Years.

No issues with deployment.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

100% as no manual intervention is required once the solution is implemented.

100%.

It was quite straightforward for me as I had experience with other ETL tools and the concepts.

Through vendor team and the level of expertise was satisfactory.

OWB.