Item: SAP Data Services
Rating: 8
Author: Himanshi Arora

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Data Services is used to extract, transform and load data from/to various sources such as Text files, Excel sheets, CSV files and SAP HANA tables. It is used by the IT department. It is used to address various types of business problems such as loading vendor details, cost information, customer data, material descriptions, etc.

Pros and Cons

Extracting data from various types of data sources
Transforming data using joins, functions, look ups, etc.
Loading data into different kinds of targets

Debugging is not very easy. When one wants to see the flow of data from one Query to another, the process is not very smooth and efficient.
A lot of functions do not behave the way they should. I have faced problems with the count() function.
I have faced problems while loading Excel files. The same set of options will work in one case but not in the other.

Return on Investment

Positive for ETL
Okay for Address Cleansing
Negative for debugging

Alternatives Considered

I have only used SAP Data Services for ETL purposes.

Other Software Used

SAP HANA

Likelihood to Recommend

It is well suited when you want to extract data from a source supported by data services, to perform various transforms on that data (such as joins, look ups, applying functions, performing delta merge, etc.,) and also to further load the transformed data into the target. Data Services allows you to schedule the jobs as per your business requirement. Therefore, you can manage the loading of data into the target as per your needs.

I have faced issues in performing one time updates for historical data using Data Services. Map operation does not behave the way it should and therefore I would not recommend it for those scenarios.

Review from a new user

Overall Satisfaction with SAP Data Services