Sunday, November 11, 2012

Exists or not exists- that is the answer


Using more complex queries that can answer simple question like who bought product A but didn't bought product B? Or in another Case: which customers from the customer’s table don’t have an order in the order table ,is one of the abilities that we would like to give for the users and allow them to use it simply and freely as we can.

In order to do that we can use in some cases the sub query method which is good and solid, but in some cases using the Exist \ not exist would be better.
And why is that?

There are first of all performance differences that makes the exists operator make a better work of evaluating which is the driving table and by doing so , use in some cases the appropriate index ,there is also the ability to work with nulls.
For a better understanding of the differences between Exists and subquery read here:





Using the Island resort we will use the Customer and the Sales tables in order to answer a simple question:

Who are the customers who haven’t paid so far?

  1. first we will build the following predefined condition using this syntax:



SELECT Customer.cust_id
FROM Customer

WHERE NOT EXISTS

(select Sales.cust_id from Sale where Customer.cust_id=Sales.cust_id)





  1. We will create a simple query that returns the customers ID’s :

  1. The result will be getting just those customers who don’t have any invoice :




Thursday, March 1, 2012

What's New in Mobile BI ?

What's new in SAP BI Mobile ?

According to the following link iphone devices are currently supporting SAP Explorer, still much to come in Feature pack 3 where also Android devices will be supported :

Monday, January 9, 2012

BI4 Feature Pack 3 Planned Features for the BI Platform

What new features awaits in BI4 feature pack 3 ?

Some Highlights :

  • Call from Bex query to a web address,another Bex query (via report linking )
see here for more details :
  • OEM support
  • Use custom user attributes for enhanced security in IDT
  • Bi Launch Pad supports theming
  • SAP Streamwork integration with BI Launch Pad
  • Hot full automated backup of the repository (DB +FRS )
For further reading here Tammy Powlas article :

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

SAP to Deliver Integrated Social Analytics to the Enterprise

"SAP Social Media Analytics by NetBase enables enterprises to create an enterprise social analytics platform that offers a wider and deeper perspective on a range of activities"...

This tool allows organizations to extract unstructured data from the web (95 million social media posts daily from Twitter, Facebook, news feeds, blogs and other sources) and by that analyse trends,feedbacks
,requests and many other data items that can bring a better understanding of the business work flow.

Watch this new Video :

Sunday, December 4, 2011

SAP pays $3.4B for cloud vendor SuccessFactors

SAP is about to acquire SuccessFactors ,a provider of cloud-based human capital management tools.

In order to become a major player in the cloud and cloud BI business and compete with already in motion vendors like Oracle,Informatica,Salesforce and Microstrategy.
Click here for the original article :

Monday, November 28, 2011

On security breach In the CMC and data leak prevention

Building permissions in the CMC is made up easy but when it comes to private folders it gets complicated.

What happens when a user sends a restricted public report to a user that doesn't have the right to see that report in the public folder?

That user will see that report because he has full control rights on his inbox object and his private folder.

There is no way to change all the inboxes right automatically through the CMC, writing an SDK script can do the work, but till this issue is covered you will remain with a security breach in the CMC.

Has far as I know this issue suppose to be resolved in the current version, I'll keep you update about that.

So what can you do in order to lower this breach as possible?

  • Use an SDK script to change the inbox\private folder objects
  • Allow schedule and send rights only to power users (problematic approach)
  • Define the reports with the options of refresh on open + row level restriction

Still you can't prevent people from seeing unwanted data and in order to monitor the "crime level" it recommended doing the following:

  • Run an audit report that will show you which reports the user accessed and which users are accessing reports that their universes are restricted to those users?
  • Check who sends reports to who (using VB, java or COM scripts,3rd part tools or some audit data )
  • Run periodic tests in the CMC to check the inboxes and private folders content.

What is the next generation of data security?

  • Security that works in the view level and not just in the data base access level
  • Alerts based on illegal user activity (just like in banks )
  • Encrypted data engine based on the destination target and the user rights.
Example: if John from sales sends a sales report(through inbox, e-mail, folder and ctr) to Smith from HR the engine recognizes the permission differences and encrypts the data.