Four months ago, I was unaware of even what SAP was but after starting the consulting career I have been exposed to many functional and technical SAP trainings. Starting to work on an on-premise data warehouse as a newbie gave me a big picture of how things work. But wait good things are coming?
In the past few weeks, I have been introduced to the Data warehouse cloud (DWC) and I was convinced by the fact that yes the 'CLOUD' hype is real. The DWC with its ability to function on the cloud and able to communicate to other SAP on-premise products like BW4H, BWH, S4H, etc., and even on cloud products like SAC fascinated me. Having some experience in story building within SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) I decided to see what DWC has to offer in story-building and how DWC and SAC are related so, I decided to do some research and share personal insights in this my first blog post.
Let's begin!
A very quick intro on what the story is and why do we even need it? A story is nothing but a presentation-style document that uses charts, visualizations, text, images to describe the data and get useful insights from it. A story should be:
- Must have a storyline.
- Simple to follow.
- Must follow a logical direction.
In DWC once the data is modeled the next step is to build a story so that all the valuable insights from data can be shared within the organization. For story building, I found there are some pre-requisites that need to be met to access the entities created in the data builder or business builder layer.
- Objects in DWC must be exposed for consumption to be available for story building.
- Semantic usage should be selected as an ‘analytical dataset’ to be utilized in story building.
- Select appropriate measures and attributes in the data builder and business builder layer to be used in story building.
- To utilize additional SAC functionalities a live connection between DWC and SAC is to be set up but you need to have an appropriate Admin role to make changes in the system.
Let’s explore the story-building feature in DWC.
1. Choose a space in which you want to build a story.
2. Select data from the data builder and business builder layer to be used in story building.
3. Components to add to your story:
- Charts (comparison, indicator, correlation, trend, distribution)
- Tables (vertical & horizontal)
- Geo Maps
- Filters (story, page, widget)
- Thresholds and Prompts
- Linked Models or Dimensions
4. Four basic modes in story building include:
- Designer: includes building and styling options
- Control: contains widget filters to control different views of a story
- Edit: allows users to make changes to the existing widgets in a story
- View: changes story into read-only mode
5. Measures and attributes that are identified in the data builder and business builder will only appear within the story building. Calculated measures can also be created based on business needs.
7. Another useful feature is linked analysis where different charts are linked together to analyze them together with the same filters or widgets.
Two models are linked as well where dimensions from different models are joined to do a correlation analysis as shown below.
8. Additional functionalities:
- Under the file menu, there is an option to add story detail which helps users to add additional information to describe the business needs of a story.
- Under format, different layout options are available to display stories on different devices like laptops or mobile, etc.
- Underlying data can be viewed by clicking on a particular chart and selecting ‘examine’ under the display option.
- Stories can be made more appealing by adding comments, images, smart insights, web pages, and much more. So, keep exploring 🙂
More Information
I followed some of these useful links to create my first stories in DWC.
All of the features mentioned in the blog post are available in SAC as well but we can say DWC has a lite version of the story building feature. Additionally, SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) is available as an embedded offering within DWC but live connectivity must be established between DWC and SAC to switch between both applications. A DW administrator can connect SAP Data Warehouse Cloud to SAP Analytics Cloud to make consumable views and perspectives automatically available as models. (Integrating SAP Analytics Cloud)
Conclusion
This blog post provides an overview of the main steps of story building in SAP DWC and how different functionalities can be used to provide insights from the data models in a form of a story. The next step would be to see how can we get the best out of both the worlds SAC and DWC, to make creative and perceptive stories.
Please provide feedback on the above post and share your thoughts or questions in the comments. You can also refer to already posted questions related to DWC at https://answers.sap.com/tags/73555000100800002141
Many thanks for ready my first blog! Like and share. Stay safe!
Best regards,
Fatima Nasir
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