SAP Signavio Analytics Language
SAP Signavio Analytics Language, SIGNAL is a specialized query language for process analysis.
The language is based on SQL. Like SQL, you use queries to retrieve data and perform calculations on the data. However, it is not possible to change or delete process data.
The difference to SQL is the data model. While you usually query data from multiple tables with SQL, SIGNAL queries the data from only one table, which contains nested events. In addition, SIGNAL provides numerous custom functions to work more effectively with this data structure.
SIGNAL is optimized for process mining, for example to determine conformance, cycle times, and rework, and it supports exploration at scale by all kind of SAP Signavio Process Intelligence users.
With SIGNAL, you can only retrieve data from processes to which you have access.
Data model
When mining the data of a process, you retrieve the data of a single table. This table contains the case attributes and their nested events and event attributes. The following table shows this nested structure.
case_ID | Customer ID | Status | City | events | |||||||||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1001 | 2001 | delivered | Berlin |
|
|||||||||||||||||||
1002 | 2002 | canceled |
|
The columns case_id, event_name and end_time are always present. Case attributes like Customer ID , Status, and City have the same value throughout the case. Additional event attributes, in this example Payment method and Cancellation reason can have different values for each event.
There are two ways to iterate over this data:
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per case
Each case is treated as one row. The nested events and event attributes are represented as a nested table.
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per event
Each event is treated as one row. The case ID and case attributes are repeated for each event.
Data types
The data type of a column defines which value the column can hold. All data types can occur on case level as well as on event level (nested).
SIGNAL supports the following data types:
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Strings
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Numbers stored as double precision floating point
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Timestamps stored with millisecond precision, without time zone information.
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Durations stored with millisecond precision
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Booleans
All of these data types can appear in the source file and in the query result.
Both case and event attributes can be Null, indicating the absence of a value or an unknown value.
Process mining
SIGNAL queries are used in the widgets of an investigation.
When configuring widgets, you have the following options:
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Create you own queries
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Use the default queries in the widgets and customize them if necessary
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Use the predefined queries from the metrics library and customize them if necessary
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Add your own queries to the metrics library for reuse
Read more on the widgets in section Available widgets.
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