Book Review for SAP Press Getting Started with SAP Lumira

Getting Started with SAP Lumira by SAP’s Christian Ah-Soon and Peter Snowdon is a new SAP Press Book that is 565 pages long.  This time I read the electronic version of the book, and I had the book open on a laptop while I followed along with SAP Lumira Desktop (and in some cases, SAP Lumira Cloud).  You can read a sample of the book here which also includes an index.

Why should you be interested in Lumira?  Forbes predicts that for 2015 that “Companies will invest in self-service, automation, and augmentation to answer the skills shortage” and  “Storytelling will be the hot new job in analytics“.  These are areas that Lumira represents for SAP.

Following along in the book, I learned how to set up tracing bsed on the BO_trace.ini file:

I also learned about How to Configure the Auto-Enrichment File in Lumira

The heart of the book, in my opinion, is the visualization.  I followed along with the book using the Titantic dataset, Olympics dataset, and the SAP Price data set that I downloaded from Yahoo Finance.

I should note that the book is based on an older version of Lumira as the “explore” icon is missing.  That said you can still learn from the book.

What did I learn?  I can only highlight a few items here.

I liked the calculated dimensions example.  In my example, I counted the number of times “HANA” appeared in the ASUG SAP TechEd  Data Management sessions using the Contain function in Lumira:

I had been using Data Services to perform this type of text analysis and processing.

I also created a custom hierarchy, following along with the book:

Using the Titantic data I see a use for the radar chart:

You can see from above that females had a higher percentage of surviving than 3rd class adult males or male crew members.

I also hadn’t paid much attention before to the Copy to clipboard feature available in the visualization gallery; this is good to know if you want to use the visualization you created in PowerPoint.

This is just a subset of what I have learned and I will share more as time allows.

I encourage you to try the book today.  I am looking forward to learning more about Lumira at BI 2015 in March.