Introduction
The SAP Datasphere Intelligent Lookup Series is intended to provide you with useful guidance on how to utilize the Intelligent Lookup to leverage the potential of your data landscape. In order to design business processes efficiently and satisfy customers, a very high master data quality is essential. Often, this is not the case in-house. Fortunately, there are external providers who make optimized master data (e.g. organizational data and address data) available. For successful use of these, they have to be linked with internal data. SAP Datasphere provides Intelligent Lookup, a solution to match external data with internal data that semantically fits together even if there is no common key between these data.
This article is the third in the blog post series and will give an overview about how to integrate an Intelligent Lookup in your existing data landscape.
We plan to release a new blog every Friday for the coming weeks. These blogs have been released so far:
- Harmonize your internal datasets with external data
- How filtering and sorting enhances your work with Intelligent Lookup
- How to integrate an Intelligent Lookup in your existing Data Landscape (this blog)
- What is a fuzzy match and why should I care?
Modern data landscapes
Modern data landscapes are heterogeneous and distributed. In order to meet the day-to-day business needs, business users have to put different data in context.
The problem here is that data from different data sources, whether cloud or on-premise or different providers, are usually in different data formats. The data cannot be directly linked to each other, as strict technical joins cannot find matches for syntactic differences in semantically identical key attributes.
To cope with this problem, it often requires extensive and possibly time-consuming data preparation and harmonization scenarios. The quality of this process has a direct influence on the quality available to a company in the further course of data analysis.
SAP Datasphere supports the modern concept of the Business Data Fabric. A concept that is intended to solve this problem. It equips any organization to deliver meaningful data to every data consumer. To do so, Intelligent Lookup is one of the most important functions of a modern data landscape.
Intelligent Lookup in a modern data landscape
With SAP Datasphere Intelligent Lookup, power users as well as self-service users from the line of businesses are enabled to harmonize their data from different data sources in the simplest way. Therefore, it forms the link between the federated data tables of the source systems (SAP and non-SAP) and the different Spaces in SAP Datasphere. Figure 1 illustrates a high level overview of how Intelligent Lookup can be applied in a modern data landscape.
Intelligent Lookup in a modern data landscape (Source: Own image)
For self-service users, Intelligent Lookup offers an intuitive solution to connect multiple data sources with dissimilar keys. This way, business analysts can dedicate themselves to answering their daily tasks and work with all the data at their fingertips. Without this capability, they would be dependent on the help of more sophisticated data transformation and harmonization processes, which they usually cannot create themselves.
In addition, the Intelligent Lookup is a great functionality for power users. The Intelligent Lookup offers all the tools to map even complex harmonization scenarios. In this way, it forms a cornerstone of the SAP Datasphere as the foundation of a Business Data Fabric. Data from different business contexts can be connected and the data landscape simplified. A great example of how this can look in a real example is described by tim.huse in his blog post Harmonize your internal datasets with external data.
In it, he also presents the sequence model - a methodology for achieving your goal in five phases.
Sequence model (Source: Blog post by Tim Huse)
The results of an Intelligent Lookup can be used as input for any data modelling option in SAP Datasphere.
Conclusion
In this blog post, you learned about the general concept of Intelligent Lookup and how to position it in a modern data landscape. The key take aways are:
- Intelligent Lookup is a key feature of SAP Datasphere
- Intelligent Lookup offers great functionality to join different data sets without a common key
- Applied with the right methodology, Intelligent Lookup can be used across the organization - from self-service users to power users.
Thanks for reading! I hope you find this post helpful. For any questions or feedback just leave a comment below this post. Feel free to also check out the other blog posts in the series. I would like to thank my colleagues carolivia, florian91, tim.huse and he-rima for collaborating on the blog post series.
Best wishes,
Josef
Further Links
- One-Stop-Shop to Intelligent Lookup in SAP Datasphere
- End2End Walk Through – Intelligent Lookup
- Intelligent Lookup Documentation in SAP Help Portal
- A deeper look into how SAP Datasphere Enables a Business Data Fabric
Find more information and related blog posts on the topic page for SAP Datasphere.
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