Lumira 2.0 Discovery

During some downtime recently, I decided to play around with the new Lumira 2.0. I had not used Lumira 1.0 in about eight months. I was excited to see what improvements were made to the tool from the first iteration.

I knew that 2.0 is similar to 1.0 in that users have to deploy an add-on to the BI server. Lumira 2.0 renamed Lumira Desktop to Lumira Discovery and integrated Design Studio’s functionality into another tool called Lumira Designer. This blog focuses on Lumira Discovery and, in particular, about connecting to a universe.

What I Like Best about Lumira Discovery:

1. Previously, Lumira Desktop had three screens: Prepare, visualize, and compose. In Discovery, these are integrated into one single canvas page. It removes what I thought to be excessive amount of steps, especially since this solution is supposed to be user friendly and able to provide quick access to data.
2. After a short period of time getting used to where all the options available are, navigation was easier and seemed intuitive. Like Web Intelligence: its many options for charts can be accessed by either right clicking or from the contextual menu icons.
3. While I didn’t do an in-depth analysis on this, it was nice to see there is an ability to consume anything created in Lumira Discovery with Lumira Designer. This is will allow for reusability and collaboration between IT and business users.
4. Easily connecting to a Live BW source. Discovery supports BEX hierarchies and variables.
5. I was able to connect to a universe from my BI Launchpad. The query builder screen is the same as the one in WebI, which will make any Webi user comfortable. There are a couple caveats to using a UNX, which I detail in the “Needs Improvement” section below.
6. While users cannot create a LUMX file from BI Launchpad, it is possible to edit these kinds of files. This is a great feature if you have published something from Discovery application, but then noticed a quick fix is needed. Hopefully, future versions will include a create option from within BI Launchpad.
7. Merge, Append and linking datasets: I remember glitches with these in Lumira 1.0. In 2.0, once you understand which one you need to use based on your use case, it’s fairly easy.

• MERGE DATASET – While Append adds the records of data set B to data set A, Merge adds columns from dataset B to dataset A. The prerequisite is to have a common key column of the same data type.
• APPEND DATASET – Appending two datasets is similar to performing a union between them. The mandatory prerequisite for appending one dataset to another is that both the datasets must have equal number of columns of similar data types.
• LINK DATASET – Linking Datasets can be done when there is no common key but having a common column (e.g. Country) into which the data can be blended.

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About Mitesh Shah

Mitesh is a manager in Protiviti’s Data Management and Advanced Analytics solution. He specializes in data services, front-end reporting and analysis, and Information Governance for numerous enterprise customers across the country. Specifically he works with SAP Data Services, SAP Information Steward, SAP BusinessObjects and SAP HANA.