The first question with Prism is, “Why do we exactly need it with all the other reporting capability Workday provides.”
The primary reason is that Prism gives us the capability to acquire , transform and blend Workday data with external data, publish it as Prism Data Source which can then be used with reporting and discovery boards.
Security: Workday provides four security domains to provide permissions for the Data Catalog. These domains secure access to datasets and not the published Prism data source which is configurable as per requirement.
Below is Prism terminology which we need to make ourselves familiar with:
Process of data acquisition consists of importing data from Workday and external sources to create our Base Data Sets (BDS). These BDS can be transformed. For eg. field types can be changed etc.
We can then combine these BDS to create Derived Data Sets (DDS). DDS is created by importing a dataset which already exists. Primary pipeline is created from imported dataset and then additional datasets are imported to be blended together. We join Base Data Sets using the primary key(eg. Employee ID).
Transformation Stages Include:
- Manage Fields
- Filter
- Join
- Union
- Group By
Common functions are for example TRIM, TO_DATE, SUBSTRING, LENGTH etc. which are similar to Workday calculated fields.
Once all transformations are complete, we can Publish the data source and build reports on the newly published data source or create Discovery Boards.
Discovery Boards:
Discovery Boards are used for visualization where you can configure multiple viz to give a visual representation of data.Watch a webinar by Workday here as a use case: Link
Data Lineage:
In case of multiple datasets due to transformations and blending, data lineage gives a nice visual representation of how the datasets connect to the overall workflow.
