NTT DATA Business Solutions Graduates Diary - Week 4

Hot on the heels of week 3…

Week 4 Blog

Most of week 4 was spent learning how to build SAP Business Objects universes. We attended a 3-day course on the Information Design Tool (IDT) with Sean Fitz-Patrick who gave us in-depth insights into creating data foundation layers from databases and building business layers on top of them, organising data into folders, sub-folders, dimensions and measures. We had a hands-on workshop designing a Motors universe, ensuring any subsequent queries run in Web Intelligence came back with the correct results. This involved carefully looking at the database schema and resolving any existing table loops which might result in incomplete or incorrect reporting data, by creating alias tables and contexts.

We felt that the IDT course was very well-positioned within the training programme schedule, having been through a 2-day Web Intelligence and a 2-day SQL course. This earlier couple of courses allowed us to get an idea of how the finished product looked like to the end user as well as gain the SQL knowledge required to work in IDT.

Finally, the last day of the week was about successful data warehousing. This session provided us with an overview of some of the important pre-requisites to building a successful data warehouse (DW). This involved sections on client requirements gathering, data enhancement and quality, data simplification via dimensional modelling for effortless reporting, and data warehouse population through ETL (Extract, Transform, Load).

We were delighted to see our mentor, Emma back from holiday who popped down to the training centre for a chat to see how we were doing. We would like to take the opportunity to thank her for all the hard work and dedication in getting us graduates ready for client engagements.

That’s it for now…

Andrew Hughes, Antonio Minkov, Inga Kemp, Marie Fegan, Thinh Tran