Preface

This year (2014) was an amazing year for German football fans as their national team won the World Cup 2014 title. A few days later, I received a subscription e-mail from SAP with the title How SAP helped Germany win the World Cup. It was very interesting for me to know how. As SAP is one of the leading IT companies in the world, it was not clear to me how IT can help a sports team or even a football team to win a title or a medal. You can have a look at the e-mail body in the following screenshot:

So it is all about Business Intelligence (BI). Now, we can see BI participating in almost every single aspect of our life, even in sports. SAP used the Big Data concept to handle vast amount of data, SAP HANA to assure optimum response time, and SAP BO BI 4.x to make data available to the right users in the right format (reports, dashboards, and analysis), as we can see in the previous example. The results were amazing, Germany won the World Cup title with the aid of BI. This era is not the "hard work one", but rather it is the "intelligent work one".

SAP BO BI 4.x is a complete BI solution with many tools bundled together to satisfy different needs of BI. One important tool is Information Design Tool, which is used to create and build the BO semantic layer (Universe). Universe is an intermediate layer between database and BI tools that will transform database entities and joins into business objects stored in the Business layer. These business objects can be consumed later on by different BO reporting solutions.

In this book, we will learn how to create a Universe from scratch. We will cover all related topics in detail along with step-by-step hands-on and real examples. We will discuss design best practices, the Universe development life cycle, Universe testing, security, and the multiuser development environment.

Congratulations on taking a step toward learning how to create a Universe using SAP BO BI 4.x! Are you ready? Let's go…