Preface

SAP Data Services delivers an enterprise-class solution to build data integration processes as well as perform data quality and data profiling tasks, allowing you to govern your data in a highly-efficient way.

Some of the tasks that Data Services helps accomplish include: migration of the data between databases or applications, extracting data from various source systems into flat files, data cleansing, data transformation using either common database-like functions or complex custom-built functions that are created using an internal scripting language, and of course, loading data into your data warehouse or external systems. SAP Data Services has an intuitive user-friendly graphical interface, allowing you to access all its powerful Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) capabilities from the single Designer tool. However, getting started with SAP Data Services can be difficult, especially for people who have little or no experience in ETL development. The goal of this book is to guide you through easy-to-understand examples of building your own ETL architecture. The book can also be used as a reference to perform specific tasks as it provides real-world examples of using the tool to solve data integration problems.