EDI/Data Integration Expert Interview Preparation Guide

Data profiling is the process of assessing and understanding the content, quality, and structure of enterprise data. It is an essential step in reconciling semantic differences in common business vocabulary such as customer, address, and product that varies among applications, and which, if unaddressed, results in contradictory information across the enterprise.

Following are the benefits of data integration:

☛ Makes reporting, monitoring, placing customer information across the enterprise flexible and
☛ convenient.
☛ Data usage is efficient.
☛ Cost Effective.
☛ Risk adjusted profitability management as it allows accurate data extraction.
☛ Allows timely and reliable reporting, as data quality is the prime technology for business challenges.

Once data is profiled, an EDI platform can execute data cleansing functions to ensure the validity and consistency of information. It standardizes name, address, and other values, and resolves missing data fields, parses data elements, and corrects poorly formatted or conflicting data.

The process of combining data from different resources.
The combined data is provided to the users with unified view.
Information from different enterprise domains are integrated - known as Enterprise Information Integration.
Useful for merging information from different technologies among enterprises.
The sub areas of data integration are

☛ Data Warehousing.
☛ Data Migration.
☛ Master Data Management.

Data transformation services enable data to be transformed from one form to another to allow reconciliation between data elements residing in different information sources. The transformation services leverage pre-built and customized mappings that take into account complex data hierarchies and relationships.

☛ What is the difference between Query transform and SQl transform in BODI?
☛ What is the difference between lookup(0 and lookup_ext() functions in BODI?
☛ How we will implement Full outer join in BODI?Explain with some examples?
☛ What is the difference between parallel processing projects and grid processing projects?
☛ What is Cascade and Drill Through? What is the difference between them?
☛ How do you import tables from source metadata?
☛ What is DI Hierarchy, What are the reusable objects?

EDI offers flexible mechanisms for "right-time" data delivery in an SOA, including high-volume bulk data movement, near-real time capabilities, data federation, and changed data capture that handles only information that has been updated to accelerate load times and minimize operational impact.

☛ What is EDI?
☛ What are the things which makes EDI solutions differ from standard XML solutions?
☛ How to create EDI schema?
☛ What is the default character set supported by EDI pipeline?
☛ How does BizTalk resolves Agreement?
☛ When does fallback agreement properties come into picture?
☛ It is required to use EDI Pipeline in the EDI solution, but I can't see in the options?
☛ What are the values which Segment Separtor Suffix and Segment Terminator Suffix can have?
☛ Is there a realtion between EDI send pipeline and Parties?
☛ What are the options to release EDI Batch message to destination?
☛ Is it possible to receive Multiple Interchanges in a Single Message and parse it?
☛ Can we access EDI message context properties in orchestration?

EDI provides in-depth lineage of data - when it was changed, how, by whom, and across which applications - to enable auditing, reporting, and analysis essential to meeting the demands of legislated regulations and internal/external auditors.

The different types of the source system in SAP includes

☛ SAP R/3 source system
☛ SAP BW
☛ Flat files
☛ External Systems