Metadata-driven Data Migration for SAP Projects

SAP applications are mission-critical for many enterprises today. However, projects to introduce a new SAP solution or consolidate existing SAP solutions often fail respectively overrun budget and time. A common root cause is the underestimation of data migration work. Data quality in legacy systems is often not sufficient for SAP, and specifications of the target data model often change very late in the project lifecycle, e.g. due to new business requirements or new insights about legacy systems and legacy business processes. This can cause significant re-work in the ETL jobs that extract data from source systems, cleanse that data and load it into the target SAP system(s). We apply a model-driven architecture (MDA) approach [MP10] to such data migration projects. We generate ETL infrastructure from SAP metadata. This novel approach (known as the IBM Ready-To-Launch (RTL) for SAP solution [Ibm10]) significantly reduces project risk and cost. In addition, data quality is addressed and improved. Our demo will show programmatic access to SAP metadata and its systematic exploitation throughout the data migration project, including the generation of logical and physical data models from this metadata, and the generation of ETL jobs. 1 The RTL for SAP Solution – System Architecture The IBM InfoSphere Information Server platform is the technology foundation of the RTL for SAP solution. It delivers enterprise information integration capabilities across all integration areas such as discovery, data profiling, ETL, replication, federation [GH10] and SOA services. It also offers SAP-certified application connectors to extract data from SAP applications and load data into SAP applications. By applying an MDA approach, RTL provides several novel capabilities to SAP data migration projects. On the one hand, using MDA principles, functional data requirement specifications are linked to business process specifications. On the other hand, functional data requirement specifications are linked to programmatic SAP metadata access. RTL has a so-called Rapid Generator component which can generate ETL jobs for data exchange with SAP systems. By linking ETL jobs model-based to functional data requirement specifications, which in turn are linked to business process specifications, it is now easy to adapt to changes in the business process requirements. If, for example, a change of a business process results in an additional, new business object attribute, the ETL jobs just need to be regenerated whenever such a change happens. In a traditional approach [LN06] such changes are often not detected until system integration test and require manual, often cumbersome adjustments in the ETL code base and additional testing.