On Friday, the usual suspects jamie.oswald, greg.myers3, and I released a new episode of DSLayer with foreign news correspondent joshua.fletcher2 and our pal and resident guy-that-knows-a-ton-about-a-lot esjewett.
The subject at hand: what would make a perfect semantic layer for any SAP landscape? We've already spoken in great detail about our likes, dislikes, understandings, misunderstandings, and all around personal fanboy-ism of our own semantic layers. We push all of that aside to talk about what would make a perfect semantic layer, universe, or whatever you want to call it.
While you listen, follow along in the show notes.
1:05 - Community news: SAPPHIRE is right around the corner. Will you be there?
1:29 - Tweetup? What tweetup? Not our proudest night.
2:13 - BI2013 Amsterdam will follow not far behind.
2:30 - The conversation begins - we regroup on the blog posts and tweets that brought us here today.
3:40 - What would we love to see in the ultimate semantic layer?
4:10 - Better federated queries, even beyond the enhancements coming in BI 4.1. Federated query performance might all be Jamie's fault.
5:25 - Fear the Derby.
6:30 - Sybase IQ for federation? Yes, please.
9:15 - Ooooh...virtual data warehouse. The system is smart enough when to suck in the data, materialize it, or not.
11:00 - Was the new universe in BI4 hit and fizzle?
12:35 - Can SAP HANA as a platform for federation become synonymous in the way we think of a CMS database and Auditor database? Or how long with price be a limiter?
14:30 - A cloud based semantic layer thrown in the ring? Tell me more.
16:00 - Data federation in BI4's semantic layer needs to be able to be treated like a database, not a black box, since it needs maintenance.
17:25 - Confusion around the application of BEx vs. a BOBJ universe is abound. Tool choice isn't always good.
18:50 - A universe needs to be...you know...universal, in order to be able to traverse either relational or OLAP based data sources.
20:15 - Die Deski
20:30 - Old universes (.unv) have a conversion mechanism. Why can't we see a push to close the gaps in functionality in the UNX and have a conversion mechanism for BEx to a universe?
22:25 - BW is ugly. Heh.
26:00 - But, what was Business Objects bought by SAP for?
27:40 - I want to see the universe develop as a part of the same platform as SAP HANA. Let anything consume it in the same way, any time, any where.
29:00 - If it's going to be SAP HANA in the future, let's take the best of SAP BW and SAP BusinessObjects and make it the platform of the future.
31:45 - Where does the Real Time Data Platform stop?
35:45 - The end of layers thanks to SAP HANA is a good thing or a bad thing? Depends on the use case, Ethan says.
38:10 - Currency formatting would be nice again.
38:20 - Bringing BEx query functionality in the universe itself would be a great convergence.
39:40 - Zombie Deski?
41:15 - Commonality in the way that the BI tools access the data? Novel idea. See the universe like 8 years ago. Common interfaces FTW.
44:40 - And officially, we are done with this topic...finally.