BusinessObjects™ XI Release 2 for Dummies®

Chapter 18. Putting Data Integrator to Work for You

In This Chapter

• Figuring out Data Integrator

• Getting the hang of Data Integrator Designer

• Doing administrative work with Data Integrator

BusinessObjects is a tool for more than just creating reports and sharing them among your work buddies. At the end of the data, BusinessObjects is all about data — how to access it, how to work with it, and how to make it count. Of course, it’s not all glamour! Someone’s got to get down and dirty so your “report in a couple of mouse clicks” is feasible!

To that end, BusinessObjects uses a data warehouse to store its data for you to access. It’s literally the primary repository that your organization uses to store raw data. As discussed in earlier chapters, you can go data mining, which is just a fancy way of saying that you’re going to dig in and perform some important analysis using BusinessObjects!

BusinessObjects uses the CMS repository to store its metadata (universe, security, documents); it doesn’t use any data warehouse to store it. It can use a data warehouse or any production database to query data and make useful reports. The data you eventually use in your universes — all pulled from the data warehouse — has to get there somehow! It doesn’t just happen overnight! Data can come from different sources; for example, HR data might come from PeopleSoft, while stock files may come from your production database.

BusinessObjects has a different tool, called Data Integrator, ...