Difference between BODS and BI

[Former Member]

What is the difference between BODS and BI? Can we use BODS instead of BI for reporting?

[former_member187605]

What's the difference between a cat and a corkscrew? Can we use a cat to open a bottle?

BODS is an acronym that was officially deprecated in 2010(!). It stood for Business Objects Data Services. The current version of the product is part of the SAP Enterprise Information Management portfolio of products and is called SAP Data Services (SDS or DS for short). It delivers a single enterprise-class solution for data integration, data quality, data profiling, and text data processing that allows you to integrate, transform, improve, and deliver trusted data to critical business processes (http://help.sap.com/bods).

BI stands for Business Intelligence. It can be described as "a set of techniques and tools for the acquisition and transformation of raw data into meaningful and useful information for business analysis purposes". The term "data surfacing" is also more often associated with BI functionality. BI technologies are capable of handling large amounts of unstructured data to help identify, develop and otherwise create new strategic business opportunities. The goal of BI is to allow for the easy interpretation of these large volumes of data. Identifying new opportunities and implementing an effective strategy based on insights can provide businesses with a competitive market advantage and long-term stability. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_intelligence). SAP's BI Platform (BIP) is called BusinessObjects. It is a flexible and scalable information infrastructure designed to help you more easily discover and share insights for better business decisions.

[former_member186897]

Abinesh P N S

It depends what kind of reporting you are planning to do. SAP Data Services Management Console provide couple of reporting features like Impact and Lineage Analysis, Auto Documentation, Operation Dashbaord, Data Validation and Data Quality Reports. See if that is what you are looking for otherwise BI is the tool for you.

[former_member198401]

BODS is an ETL tool while BI is a set of tools used for reporting. We can use BODS only for extracting the data, Transforming the data as per the requirement and loading in to a staging area/Target database which will be used for reporting by BI tools like Web Intelligence etc

Regards

Arun Sasi