SAP HANA: My Experiences on using "Information Composer"

[Former Member]

Hello SCN,

We have another tool from SAP for “Business Users” on HANA to explore "BIG" data in an easier way.

Firstly, I thank Tammy Powlas for a wonderful blog on tammy.powlas3/blog/2012/02/05/sap-hana-information-composer-for-the-non-technical-user  and the HELP GUIDE from SAP.

I will share my experiences and views on using "Information Composer" and also explain how to use “joins".

We have to Log on to our "IC" using URL: http://localhost:8080/IC/ and give the necessary credentials in the below screen.

Then it navigates to the welcome screen, where we have 2 options as shown below.

1) Compose

2) Upload

1) Compose:

We have 5 steps in “Compose”.

Step 1: Specify source of data.

You can see that we have an option of selecting “ALL”. It means all the Analytic views, Attribute Views, Information Views and Data sets created on our server by different users ( depends on the privileges you have) will be displayed. You have an option as shown above to select a specific “Source” you want.

In this example, I took the attribute view which I created on Customer table named “customer” based on resort business data.

Step 2: select Source B.

Now I need to select another source with which needs “customer” data for analysis to know the frequency of a particular customer visit to resort.

I selected an analytic view, which I created on invoice data named as “SERINV”.

Step 3: Combine.

Now I will have to combine this data using union or joins. So when I clicked I got the below message.

Wow! I thought SAP is helping me by to create my information view by creating the necessary union or joins. Then I got the below message.

I tried to understand where it went wrong and tried different scenarios, then I understood that this feature only helps me to identify if “UNION” is possible.

In the below case, I used an information view created by another user named “AMEXANALYSIS” and an analytic view “STOCKS1” which has a similar structure. And now this feature worked in identifying the “UNION” relationship as shown below.

Now let us get back to our scenario.

It means I have to create mappings now. This tool provides me an example illustration on working of Unions and Joins as shown below.

If you want to know what these 3 types of joins means, this tool provides some illustrations which will help us as shown below.

We have some more example illustrations on Union.

So now I went back to create an Right join so that I get all the customer details with respect to my invoice data.

You can view sample data related to the field by selecting a particular field. Then you can preview as shown below.

Now I can see my customer name and details relating to the invoice ids.

In the above screenshot, you can see I have customer ID displayed twice. So I want to hide one of those this is where the next step helps me “REFINE”

Step 4: REFINE.

You can see here now I can select which fields have to be displayed from this screen. You can also see “cust_id_1” was “disabled” as I used this field in my join.

So I have unchecked “cust_id”, now to hide it.

Then I got this below screen which I could not understand. It is not allowing me to hide this field. I was unable to figure out the reason.

So I checked all the fields and I got the data.

I have an option to add a “calculated field” if I want to add any as shown in the below screen.

We can decide if the "calculated field" added is a "attribute" or "measure" as highlighted in the above screen.

I didn’t add any additional fields and proceeded to next step.

Step 5: FINISH.

Now I can share this view with other users and immediately start to use this new “MYVIEW1” in another “information view”.

Now let us discuss about another feature of this tool “UPLOAD”.

2. Upload:

We use “upload” option to load our “data sets” into “IC”.

This tool helps me to upload .xls, .xlsx and .csv files to my “IC”.

There are 3 steps in this wizard.

Step 1: Specify source of data.

You can “Browse” to your file on your local machine and select the required file for analyzing.

You have an option to upload the file along with “column headers”. There is a limit of max size “5 million records” for upload as shown above.

Now we can clean our data using "CLEANSE DATA" option as shown below.

It cleans data by merging items with similar meaning.

Step 2: Classify.

Now we need to classify our data to specify which fields are used for calculations as shown below.

Step 3: Finish.

Thus, I was able to load my data set.

Hope you understood the benefits of using "SAP HANA Information Composer”.

Regarding "External Data upload" using flat files to "SAP HANA information composer read this document by Debjit Singha

Link: http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-26727