RE: Data Subset Tool?

The tool hasn't been used against an SAP system as yet. Dale and I were actually talking this through this afternoon (we've been out on site together today), and recognise the importance of having extraction sets (you may want to call them Knowledge Modules) already defined for people to download / plug-in and use.

There is one problem with these huge "canned packages" - the referential integrity enforced, actually within the database, borders on poor to absolutely dire! When you are talking about an ERP system like SAP, that has tens of thousands of objects all without any RI enforced apart from within application logic, then setting up an actual extraction set could conceivably take some time. Now, this is not so bad when you have DataBee, as you only have to set the extraction rules up once, and from then on (or until you upgrade and the schema changes) that extraction set can simply be run as a "push button operation".

The problem I personally foresee with an SAP system and DataBee is more user oriented. DataBee would have no problems setting up the extraction set, running through an extraction and then a load - even with the amount of tables that an SAP typically has (as Dale mentioned DataBee deals with this on a rule by rule basis, so the actual load on the tool is no different) - the main hurdle is setting up the rules. Without RI within the database, DataBee has no way of generating the bulk of the table -> table rules within the schema automatically, so these will have to be set up by hand. To then go on to do this, the user will have to have a good understanding of the tables within the SAP system, and their relationships with each other (unless the column naming conventions are the same, then you could use the "Column Finder" tool which is a part of DataBee that pattern matches column names).

As I mentioned, this is something that we are currently looking in to, and Dale and I both see the benefits of having this somewhere for other users to take advantage of (why reinvent the wheel), but we need to find a user of SAP (or any of the other apps providers canned black boxes) that is willing to spend the time with us to take up the challenge (any takers? ;P).

So the question has to be Jared - if it could cut a subset of an SAP system, would you buy it?

-----Original Message-----
Sent: 20 January 2002 21:15
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

Do you know if anyone has successfully used this tool on an SAP database? That would be *truly* impressive.

Jared

On Sunday 20 January 2002 10:55, Dale Edgar wrote:
> Hi Jared
>
> > I've seen some pretty ugly schemas in Oracle, from third
> > party apps in particular.
> >
> > It would be most interesting if an automated tool could
> > subset these.
>
> They do get ugly don't they - however, I would be very suprised if DataBee
> was not able to cut a subset.
>
> DataBee is quite simple in concept - at its most fundamental level it
> processes a list of rules which tell it which tables need which supporting
> rows from other tables. The schema complexity is largely an irrelevant
> issue - DataBee takes things one rule at a time and says "I have this row
> in this table therefore I need these rows from this table based on this
> join condition). It is very fast and implicitly eliminates duplicates. It
> is also interesting to note that table size is also not super important.
> Sure the extract is slower on large databases, but the extract time scales
> upwards with the size in a very well behaved manner.
>
> Give it a try if you want. There is a fully functional evaluation version
> (with sample schema) available for download on the DataBee website.
> http://www.DataBee.com
>
>
> Thanks
> Dale Edgar
> Net 2000 Ltd.
> Dale_at_DataBee.com

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