BOBJ Reporting Acceleration
Centralized Data Transformation (Data Franchising)
The SAP software Business Objects (BOBJ) offers performance management, planning, querying, and analysis tools for reporting. Like other BI tools designed for visualization rather than transforming large data sources, BOBJ benefits from central data pre-packaging or the „Data Franchising„.
Data franchising, first defined in 2003 by Richard Sherman of Athena Solutions, refers to data transformation tasks that integrate BI tools and can reuse data subsets. It prevents inherent metadata complexity, data redundancy, and synchronization issues, as well as performance problems when transforming data in the BI layer.
The SortCL program in the IRI Voracity-Platform or component IRI CoSort is a popular and powerful data preparation solution for Business Objects. SortCL quickly combines Data transformation, data quality and data masking for large, structured data sources. And it produces handoffs in the table and file layouts required by BI tools. Therefore, using SortCL with BOBJ can significantly improve reporting times.
A simple laptop-based benchmark recently provided proof. When BOBJ performed the necessary sort, join, and aggregation transformations on 100 MB file sources for a report, the entire job took 70 seconds. The same transformations executed in a CoSort SortCL program took 23 seconds, with the results available for multiple applications. The Business Objects user only needed an additional six seconds to run the report, making the entire job with CoSort just 29 seconds.
For more information on benchmarking and the interaction of CoSort with BOBJ, please see here.