Within the SAP installed base, organizations have started leveraging HANA and HANA Cloud Platform to strengthen their business process using technology. However, one question that all enterprise CIOs are still asking is how to manage the data. Looking at the challenges that they are facing, these can be categorized into three buckets
1. Can the data be smartly accessed from any location, even remotely?
2. Can the data be replicated in another environment, without having any impact on the current structure?
3. Can data undergo complex transformations?
Well, all these questions can be answered with one simple solution – Smart Data Integration. Smart Data Integration (SDI) is an integral part of your HANA database to handle all types of data integration. So the answer to the above 3 questions that enterprise CIOs have is
Let us have a sneak peek into each of these elements to give you a much better insight.
Data Federation
With data federation, you can access your on-premise database or even big data (Hadoop) from your HANA cloud database. This does not require any physical movement of the database and ideally should be followed only if the volume of data is low and the frequency of database access is not very high.
Data Replication
This is the next step in the data integration process where from your HANA database on cloud, you can access data from the original source on a real time basis. However, this real time access and replication is possible only on a selected sources for eg: databases like Oracle, SQL Server, DB2 and other sources like Twitter.
Data Transformation
In this scenario, you can apply complex transformation on your data before you actually move or store it in HANA. The same is applicable on data that is already available in HANA and needs further transformation.
What are these transformations?
1. Anything from SQL- like operations like join, filter and aggregate
2. Complex operations like pivoting your data or creating conditional logic (CASE transformation)
Baring these two types of transformation, there is a third one where you can preserve your data history to create a series of history changes. A very simple example here is – deleting a data in the source will automatically transform into a trigger in the form of a “flag” that is set to inactive but the record is kept in the history
The next question that CIOs have is how this entire process of SDI done is. The answer lies in two key components of SDI
1. Data provisioning Server
2. Data provisioning Agent
The data provisioning server also coined as dpserver is a native server in HANA database. To access this, you just need to activate the dpserver in the HANA configuration.
The data provisioning agent is a small component that needs to be installed on-premise. The adapters that care of all communication protocols with the source systems are deployed on this agent. The agent performs a 2 step process
1. Step1: Get data from the source
2. Step 2: Compress and send over HTTPS to HANA Cloud Platform in encrypted format
On doing a further drill down on the SDI agents you will notice that some of these agents are real time enabled. Other than the OOTB adapters, there is also a JAVA based SDK available. This SDK is used to create custom adapters. Other than the real time adapters, there are ones that are used for batch extraction. Here is a list of real time and batch adapters
Just to give you a comparison between traditional data integration solutions and solutions using native technology, refer to the following illustration below
Courtesy: https://blogs.saphana.com/2015/09/11/simplifying-sap-hana-data-integration-landscape/
Sodales Solutions has developed strong competency in HANA Cloud Platform with strong technical knowhow in Smart Data Integration, helping our customers to leverage this cutting edge technology. Sodales Solutions is an award-winning SAP Cloud Platform solution extension partner. Sodales was founded as a consulting company. Over the past one year, Sodales has evolved into a successful application development company focused on developing and selling apps built on Hana Cloud Platform. Sodales has referenceable customers across industries and geographies for SCP apps. Sodales has expertise in SCP DBAAS, WebIDE plug-ins, S/4 HANA extensions, SAP SuccessFactors extensions and SAP Smart Business Apps, and is now expanding rapidly into the Ariba extension space.
To know more about our services and solutions that we offer across HCP space, write to us at sana.salam@sodalessolutions.com or call us at +1.647.824.4286.