TX2014 FEATURE HIGHLIGHTS

TX2014 FEATURE

HIGHLIGHTSDiscover what distinguishes us from the rest.

TX2014 offers powerful and flexible features that address your data warehousing needs. Browse this book to learn more about our most exiting features and find out why more than 2,600 companies worldwide have chosen TimeXtender Softwares's Data Warehouse Automation Platform to fill their

data warehousing needs.

For more inspiration or contact visit www.timextender.com

Enjoy!

Data Warehouse Automation – and more . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

FEATURESData Warehouse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Data Staging . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Data Lineage Diagrams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Automated Documentation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Incremental Load . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Managed Thread Execution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Table Partitioning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

SQL Snippets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

Work Items . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

Version Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

Team Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Multiple Environment Deployment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) Cubes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

Business Perspectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

Offline Cube Processing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

Writeback for SSAS Multidimensional . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Language Control for SSAS Multidimensional . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

QlikView Modeler and Script Generator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

APPLICATION ADAPTERSSAP R/3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

SalesForce.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

Dynamics CRM Online Adapter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

TABLE OF CONTENTS

The TX2014 Data Warehouse Automation Platform makes build-ing a data warehouse faster and easier than ever before. Long gone are the days of late night coding sessions and futile at-tempts to keep the entire data warehouse solution in your head. TX2014's innovative drag and drop interface minimizes the need to code SQL, while its automatization features save you large amounts of time and improve performance to levels impossible to reach with a traditional, "hand-coded" approach.

Build OLAP cubes faster than everBut having a data warehouse is rarely a goal in itself – the value of a data warehouse is measured in the insights it gives the business. TX2014 enables you to build OLAP cubes and QlikView Models that give the users in your organization the data they need to make better decisions and drive the business forward. All in the same fast and user-friendly interface used for building your data warehouse.

Seamless integration with Microsoft SQL Server toolsWhile the aim of TX2014 is to eliminate the need for coding data warehouses and OLAP cubes, we do recognize that there are situations that call for code. As a Data Warehouse Automation Platform, TX2014 works seamlessly with other tools on the Microsoft SQL Server to create the solution you need.

Data Warehouse Automation – and more

”TX is what I call ‘a magic tool’. We could develop a solution in about one fifth of the time of what we needed with the classical tools.”

Luc Cos, Managing Partner, CALM – Co

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Dynamics

Data Sources Data Warehouse OLAP

Dimensions

Reports

Staging Area

Oracle

SAP

Other

DataCleansing

DataQuality

RAW (_R)

VALID (_V)

DataCleansing

DataQuality

RAW (_R)

VALID (_V)

The Data Warehouse Process – from Data Source to Business Insights

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Feature

Data Staging

The data staging area is a temporary location for data between the source systems and the data warehouse. This is where source data is copied to in the extract phase of ETL and is the first inte-gration point for data coming from multiple source systems. This is also where the majority of data cleansing and data validation is performed, prior to copying the cleaned and conformed data into the data warehouse for persistent storage.

The rich transformation and data validation features available in TX2014 allows you maximum flexibility, whether you just want to use the staging area as a time wise integration point of data from multiple sources with different load schedules or if you want to implement a fine grained cleansing procedure. This ranges from rich drag and drop features to custom SQL, user-defined functions and stored procedures.

Load strategies include both source- and target based incremen-tal load, full load and windowed loads and can be configured on a per table basis.

Feature

Data Warehouse

The overall purpose of a data warehouse is to integrate corporate data from various internal– and external data sources. Data is collected over time and stores historical events that are often not persisted in the source systems and is also commonly referred to as the single version of the truth, making the data warehouse an important asset for the organization. Data warehouses can be modeled in a relational or dimensional form of which the latter is the most common.

The star schema model is the most widely used data model for data warehousing, and the de facto standard for business focused reporting. Although the meta data driven engine in TX2014 is powerful enough to also support other models such as Inmon and Data Vault, TX2014 has an emphasis on the star schema model, also known as Kimball dimensional modeling which means that features such as surrogate keys, slowly changing dimensions, aggregations and almost everything else from the 34 subsystems of ETL are supported.

TX2014 is also build to scale and perform, thus it includes sup-port for a wide range of loading strategies such as source- and target based incremental load, just as table partitioning and data compression is a five minute operation to implement.

Feature

Data Lineage Diagrams

Most data warehouse developers have experienced the challenge of answering a common question like “what data source fields are we using for this measure?” and sometimes you can even add “and what are we doing to it in the ETL process?”

If you are one of the many, that either do not have complete end to end documentation or have documentation that might not be completely updated, the tracing feature of TX2014 will come in handy.

To answer a question like above for any measure in TX2014, simply right-click the measure and activate the trace menu option. This will show all steps between the data source(s) and the measure, including any transformations happening in the process.

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TX2014 includes fully automated generation of documenta-tion, including full version control to ensure that the gener-ated documentation corresponds to the deployed version of the project. Comments can be added to all elements in the project.

The documentation comes as a hyperlinked PDF document based on a template you can be modify as you please. The documentation is valid for IT Audit under SOX.

Feature

Automated Documentation

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TX2014 supports both source and target based incremental load. The point, in both cases, is to minimize the need for loading and transforming the same data over and over, significantly speeding up the overall ETL process.

Source-Based Incremental load takes advantage of situations where TX2014 can rely on the source system to identify new or modified records. TX2014 then only loads these records from the source system, skipping unchanged records.

Source-Based Incremental Load can be combined with Target-based Incremental Load for even better performance. The target-based approach controls how data is inserted, updated, and deleted between raw and valid table instances, which improves load times on very large tables.

Unlike the source-based approach, Target-based Incremental Load works even when the source system cannot tell which records are new or modified.

When you use Target-based Incremental Load, one or more fields that uniquely identify a record are hashed together into a new system field that is used to compare incoming and existing records. TX2014 the uses a second hashed value, based on a selection of fields chosen by the user, to decide which records to update in the valid table. This minimizes the number of updates, thus improving the load performance.

TX2014 utilizes an automated method of project execution that enables much faster execution than it is possible with tradition-ally developed approaches.

Managed Thread Execution uses multiple threads and optimizes the order of execution to speeds up the execution of a project. Multiple threads enables TX2014 to do more work in the same amount of time and TX2014 manages the work to make sure that tables, cubes and scripts are executed in the correct order.

In some cases, project execution time can be cut in half com-pared to the single-threaded un-managed execution in earlier versions of TX.

To complete the execution in the smallest amount of time, it makes sense to execute the largest tasks at the beginning. With Managed Thread Execution, TX2014 takes care of that as well to achieve the fastest possible execution.

Managed Thread Execution can halve execution times compared to traditional single-threaded un-managed execution, opening up a world of opportunities. For instance, it enables multiple daily updates of even large business intelligence solutions, ensuring that you always have an up-to-date basis for decision-making.

Table partitioning offers the ability to separate the contents of a logical table into separate physical storage units. This can greatly improve performance as only the partition(s) affected by a query, an insert or update operation will be touched.

TX2014 manages partitions with a template based approach, which allows easy reuse of partition patterns across multiple tables. When using a partitioned table as the fact table for a SSAS multidimensional cube, TX2014 will even create cube partitions that are aligned with the table partitions.

Please note that table partitioning is available in all versions of SQL Server supported by TX2014, but is not part of all editions of SQL Server.

Feature

Incremental Load

Feature

Managed Thread Execution

Feature

Table Partitioning

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With SQL Snippets, TX2014 makes it easy to reuse bits of SQL code in transformations. SQL Snippets do not break when you rename objects, are easy to apply, and enables you to edit code for many fields in one place.

SQL Snippets are parameterized SQL code with strongly typed SQL transformations. As a result, when a table or fieldname is changed, the transformations that use them are also changed.

When you have created a SQL Snippet, you can use it in any project in the project repository. The snippet can also be ex-ported and imported into other project repositories.

You can add your SQL Snippets to all appropriate fields in the project. You can always see an overview of where a particular SQL Snippet is used, and you can update SQL Snippets as required.

You can apply SQL Snippets to transformations, views, stored procedures, user defined functions, and script actions.

Work Items make collaboration on TX2014 easier for you and your team. You can use Work Items to keep track of who is work-ing on which objects when you have a group of data warehouse builders working on the same project.

While Work Items is not a mechanism for locking files, it does make it considerably easier for you to discover possible con-flicting changes.

Work Items are useful in single developer scenarios as well. If you are the only developer, you can use Work Items to keep track of which objects have been changed in which version.

TX2014 keeps track of changes to your project with version control, also known as revision control, and enables you to work with your project with peace of mind, since you can always go back to a previous version of your project if needed.

A project is defined as the collection of objects such as tables, dimensions and cubes but also includes settings for source and destination connections. Apart from the ability to restore the project to an earlier point in time, version control serves to document the history of the project.

The initial set of objects will be assigned version 1 on the first save of the project. Every subsequent save will be assigned an incremental version number 2, 3, 4 and so on. Each version uniquely identifies the state of the objects as they were at that point in time. A version also identifies the person that made the changes, a timestamp identifying when the changes were made and optionally a description of the changes that were made.

A version of the project is generated both when a project is saved explicitly and when one or more objects are deployed onto SQL Server. The later means that a restore point is automatically generated every time an object such as a table, dimension or cube is created, modified or deleted on SQL Server.

Feature

Version ControlFeature

Work ItemsFeature

SQL Snippets

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TX2014 supports multiple concurrent developers, effectively allowing true team development.

In TX2014, it's is possible to lock projects at object level, such as a single table or dimension. Objects can still be locked at a higher level such as an entire data warehouse or even the entire project, for major changes. This flexibility supports different flavors of collaboration between developers.

When working in team development mode, work items are available as a check-in/check-out mechanism to keep track of work in progress. Work items does not enforce an exclusive lock, but ensures visibility about work in progress across concurrent developers, aiding to prevent conflicts.

Similar to other development collaboration platforms, Team Development is designed to support multiple developers work-ing concurrently on separate objects within the same project. Team Development does not guarantee that conflicting changes cannot be made, but it aids at preventing conflicts during high visibility of work in progress. If a conflicting change has been made, the version control capabilities of TX2014 allow you to reopen a previous version of the project.

As the BI backend has become a mission critical asset, it is often needed to have separate environments for development and test, prior to implementing additions and modifications into the live environment. Common scenarios are development-test-live and development-test-QA-live.

With the Multiple Environment Deployment feature, you are offered a configuration approach to ease the migration prog-ress across as many environments as you require. Projects are always transferred as a whole, thus you will never again need to worry about forgetting to transfer or change individual tables or packages. All transfers are version controlled and sequence is enforced to prevent unintended transfers.

Add-on Feature

Multiple Environment Deployment

”Before I started using Multiple Environment Deployment, I had to build cubes outside of office hours, so that I didn’t disturb users in their work if I made mistakes or had to deploy new cubes.”

Flemming Andersen, IT Manager, JP Group

Add-on Feature

Team Development

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Add-on Feature

Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) Cubes

An Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) cube is a very powerful technology for multidimensional analysis of very large amounts of data. Following the dimensional data warehouse model, data is divided into facts and dimensions where facts represent the (mostly numerical) values we want to measure and dimensions describes the context of the measures. If you imagine a cube as a predefined and pre-calculated combination of all values for dimensions such as products, customers, vendors, employees over all time for all measures, you probably get the picture.

The modeling capabilities of cubes are virtually endless and includes role-playing dimensions, parent-child dimensions, refer-enced dimensions, many to many relations, standard-, derived- and calculated measures, multiple partitions and so much more.

Cubes have a reputation of being complex to build and especially the Multidimensional Expressions (MDX) language for being hard to learn. This is where the drag and drop interface of TX2014 helps to take away most of the complexity in both building cubes, but especially with the business functions that aids in implementing even complex MDX calculations using a reusable and parametrized interface. This allows you to take advantage of cubes without fearing the complexity.

While some cubes are limited in scope, others are very complex and contain multiple measures and dimensions. For a business user, it can be a frustrating experience to navigate the measures and dimensions of a complex cube when trying to locate the data that is relevant for their reporting requirements.

The solution is Business Perspectives on cubes. They allow you to create views that contain only a subset of the data in the cube. So if a user only needs sales forecasting data, then that’s what he or she sees. The cube appears less complex, the user’s task becomes more straightforward, and valuable time is saved.

Only the Enterprise and BI editions of Microsoft SQL Server support the use of perspectives, but with TX2014, you can have the same functionality even if you do not have one of these edi-tions. TX2014 can create physical perspectives, which deploys the perspective as a sepearate cube.

Add-on Feature

Business Perspectives

TX2014 contains everything you need to build a powerful data warehouse solution out of the box. Add-on Features and Application Adapters enable you to tailor your data warehouse to your needs with features beyond the core Data Warehouse Automation functionality of TX2014.

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Add-on Feature

Offline Cube Processing

As Business Intelligence (BI) has become a mission critical asset in both strategic, tactical and operational levels of busi-nesses, the demand for minimal downtime of cubes and data warehouses increase. The business simply cannot afford not to have access to these decision support systems to make better and faster decisions.

If you are not on Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise Edition or simply prefer a more managed alternative to the proactive caching feature, the offline cube processing feature of TX2014 is for you.

The offline processing is achieved by processing an offline ver-sion of the SSAS Multidimensional database, while front end access is provided through an online database. At the end of a successful update of the offline version, this will seamlessly replace the online version.

When combined with other performance improving features of TX2014, such as managed thread execution this will not only allow minimal disturbance of end users, but also improve the overall load performance.

The offline cube processing feature of TX2014 is available on SQL Server 2005 and above. The minimum required edition is Standard.

”Using the Offline Cube Proces-sing feature of TX2014, we have reduced the OLAP processing time considerably, and we can process the data cubes several times a day. We have practically no downtime anymore and the end-user experience has improved greatly.”

Flemming Andersen, IT Manager, JP GroupPAGE 12

Cube writeback is used for budgeting, forecasting or any other scenario in which you need to enter data into your reporting structure. As an example you can imagine a budgeting scenario where actuals is provided by the source systems, while the budget amounts are entered in a front-end application such as Excel or Calumo.

The values entered manually are stored in a separate partition on the data warehouse and merged with the fact table. When using the TX2014 Meta data driven model, the write back partition is created and maintained automatically, even if the structure of the fact table changes.

When you operate in a multilingual environment, there is a need to deliver the presentation layer to the consumers of cubes in multiple languages. The translation capabilities of TX2014 allows you to easily maintain the translations for multiple languages in a single screen. Translations include both captions/labels for dimensions, measures, display folders etc. as well as values for dimension members such as product names supplied from a field in the underlying dimension table.

As an addition to the translation capabilities of the Microsoft native tools, TX2014 is capable of hosting multiple versions of the same language. This allows for offline editing of translations without affecting the live cubes until you are completely done with the new version of the translation.

QlikView® is a very popular presentation tool, which allows business users to rapidly build views and dashboards. The back end implementation however very easily gets quite complex and time consuming, due to the need for scripting. Using the TX2014 drag and drop interface, you create QlikView® models ready for import into your QVW documents, thus eliminating the need for any scripting in QlikView®.

The models automatically include surrogate key for composite joins, thus eliminating the need for slow and complex synthetic keys. It uses the resident clause and allows for storage into QVD files for better performance and optionally offers translations to create models in several languages.

The TX2014 QlikView® adapter simply allows you to combine the best of two worlds, providing you agility in both data warehous-ing and presentation. It gives you all the benefits from scalable Kimball dimensional data warehouses.

Add-on Feature

Writeback for SSAS Multidimensional

Add-on Feature

Language Control for SSAS Multidimensional

Add-on Feature

QlikView Modeler and Script Generator

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Application Adapter

SAP R/3

If your organization uses SAP, you can easily extract data from your SAP R/3 system into a Microsoft SQL Server based data warehouse solution with TX2014. It has never been easier to migrate data from R/3 to SQL Server.

The TX2014 SAP adapter offers you a number of different mod-ules for SQL Server based on certified technology from German SAP experts Theobald Software:

Table. Extracts data quickly and reliably. Depending on your need, data can also be restricted with any Where statement. There is also support for Dynamic SQL statements, including SSIS variables.Query. Makes type-safe SSIS data flows from SAP Queries available in just seconds. DeltaQ. Connects to the extractor API of the SAP system and thereby utilizes the functionality that SAP’s Business Information Warehouse (BW) systems use to manage their data supply from the ERP production system. It enables SAP controlled incremental loads.BAPI. Makes it possible to call BAPIs and RFC function modules directly from your SSIS data flow.BW Cube. Extracts attributes and key measures from BW Cube and BEx Queries. Complex multidimensional data structures are turned into relational data that are easy to handle.

With TX2014, your SalesForce.com data is no further away than the server in your basement. The TX2014 SalesForce adapter enables you to use your organization's CRM and sales data in SalesForce.com on an equal footing with locally hosted production systems or other remote data sources. A 360-degree view of your business is just a few clicks away.

The Dynamics CRM Adapter addresses the fact that more and more companies are using the cloud-based version of Dynam-ics CRM. In a locally hosted Dynamics CRM solution you can use a SQL Server connector to connect to your CRM data, but in a hosted, cloud-based solution this option is not available.

The Dynamics CRM Adapter comes with the same interface and options as other data source adapters in timeXtender.

• Preview of source data• Selection Rules (except custom selection rules) Additional

data source connectors (requires Corporate or• Enterprise Edition of timeXtender)• Incremental Load

Application Adapter

Dynamics CRM Online Adapter

Application Adapter

SalesForce.com

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More TX2014

TimeXtender Academy

Please visit our website to learn more about the TX2014 Data Warehouse Automation Platform, sign up for a trial or get in touch with us.

www.timextender.com

The TimeXtender training classes emphasize the key concepts of TX2014 and our agile approach to data warehousing. The training is conducted by our in-house consultants to ensure that you are trained by specialist who know all the ins and outs of the product. The classes combine theory and hands-on as-signments, so that you are able to explore the product yourself and ask questions.

www.timextender.com/training

Agile

Dimensinal

Modeling

Training

ETL

Training

timeXtender

Certification

Workshop

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TimeXtender Software® is a world leading Data Warehouse Automation (DWA) vendor dedicated to Microsoft® SQL Server®. Our fast and user-friendly DWA platform TX2014 is all about minimizing the time spent on turning complex data into valuable information. Without coding. And without compromising on performance or possibilities. TX2014 Feature Highlights (v. 1.0) © 2014 TimeXtender®. TimeXtender® is a registered trademark of TimeXtender Holding. All other product names mentioned in this document may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies. SAP and SAP R/3 are registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and in several other countries. Microsoft, SQL Server, and Microsoft Dynamics are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.

www.timextender.com