Intro to Data Services Workbench

Since the release of SAP Data Services 4.0, the design team has been floating the idea that the Data Services Designer would be replaced as the main design interface for SAP Data Services in the near future.  Perhaps this is due to the thick-client installation that requires an unbroken connection to the repository database, which may find difficult to work with as telecommuting becomes so much more prevalent. With the release of Data Services 4.1, the Data Services Workbench was introduced as an automatic install whenever the Designer client was installed.  Initially, the workbench really performed only the most basic function: replicating data from a source database or datastore to HANA or Sybase IQ databases. Since then, we have seen the functionality of the Workbench expand to support most applications and databases as sources and targets, and to incorporate additional functionality to develop new content within the Workbench interface. This blog post will review the progress towards full functionality and note some new features and differences between Data Services Designer and Workbench.

Replication Jobs

The first purpose of Workbench was to provide a quick replication tool to port data from other database systems to SAP HANA. Creating a new replication job opens up an interface that simply shows the tables being replicated with no dataflow-type structures.

In the properties window below for each table, the user can change settings like basic column mappings, adding filters, and setting the basis for delta loads, but there are no complex operations supported, like joins, or anything other than a single simple query transform.

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About Hillary Bliss

Hillary is a Senior ETL consultant at Decision First Technologies, and specializes in data warehouse design, ETL development, statistical analysis, and predictive modeling. She works with clients and vendors to integrate business analysis and predictive modeling solutions into the organizational data warehouse and business intelligence environments based on their specific operational and strategic business needs.  She has a master’s degree in statistics and an MBA from Georgia Tech.