SAP's Business Objects (BOBJ) software provides performance management, planning, query, and analysis tools for reporting. Like other BI tools designed for visualizing rather than transforming large data sources, BOBJ benefits from centralized data pre-packaging, or "data franchising".
First defined by BI/DW expert Richard Sherman of Athena Solutions in 2003, data franchising refers to the data transformation tasks that integrate and stage data subsets BI tools can re-use. It prevents the inherent metadata complexity, data redundancy and synchronization issues, and performance problems involved in transforming data in the BI layer.
The SortCL program in the IRI Voracity platform or constituent IRI CoSort product is a popular and powerful data preparation solution for Business Objects. SortCL rapidly combines data transformation, data quality, and data masking for big, structured data sources. And it produces hand-offs in the table and file layouts that BI tools need. Using SortCL with BOBJ can thus dramatically improve reporting times.
A simple laptop-based benchmark recently proved the point. When BOBJ performed the necessary sort, join, and aggregation transforms on 100MB file sources for a report, the entire job took 70 seconds. The same transforms run in one CoSort SortCL program took 23 seconds, with the results available to multiple applications. The Business Objects user only needed another six seconds to run the report, so the entire job using CoSort took only 29 seconds.
For more information on the benchmark and how CoSort interacts with BOBJ, see:
Blog > Business Intelligence > CoSort Accelerates Business Objects BI
