Metadata-driven data migration for SAP projects

Abstract

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.