Installing a Data Product to the Foundation Services

Objective

After completing this lesson, you will be able to install a data product

Installation

Introduction

Data products are grouped by Data Package. Once you find a data product that you would like to use and its corresponding Data Package, you can choose to install the individual data product or activate its Data Package which means all of the data product in that package will be installed. The installation process generates the data product(s) in the Foundation Services of SAP BDC.

You cannot install individual entities (tables or views) of a data product. This means, even though you might only require one or two entities of a data product, all entities of the data product will be installed .Use the modeling tools in Datasphere to build models on top of the data product that use only the source entities you require.

During installation, you cannot select which fields you require from a data product or define filters to limit the data set. All fields of a data product as well as all rows are installed. You can later use Datasphere modeling tools to derive new data products based on the installed data products. For example, you can eliminate fields and add filters to fine tune SAP data products to your exact requirements.

Users with the BDC Administrator role can activate data packages in SAP BDC to make the data products included in them available for users in the catalog.

Installation

Steps to Install A Data Product: First, activate a data package. A dedicated data product entry per data product and source application is defined in the catalog based on a data product definition. Then, when you activate it, the data product is generated by the foundation services.

To get started you need to locate the Data Package that contains the data product using the SAP BDC Cockpit.

select a data package , then open its details.

From this data package, you can activate the data products you need.

Screen capture from the BDC cockpit: Select individual data products, then click on Activate. Then, choose the source system and Start Pre-Check

It is possible to activate one or several data products of a Data Package and install them to the Foundation Services.

The Activation Options dialog opens. You then specify the SAP source system that provides the business data.

The installation kicks off many background tasks such as checking prerequisites, connecting to the source tables and views, developing data pipelines to transform the data, activating subscriptions to the source data, setting up the data lake files, and of course, loading the data.

If you need all data products of a Data Package, you simply choose Activate All.

Screen Capture from the BDC cockpit: Activating all data products of tha data package: First, click on Activate All , then select the source system from the formation.

The source application is responsible for providing the push data sync to the data products to keep them in line with the real time data of the source application. There is no scheduling mechanism for updating the data products from the SAP BDC side.

Uninstalling a Data Product

If you decide you no longer want to use a data product you can uninstall it by deactivating the Data Package to which the data product belongs. This action will delete the business data and meta data of the data product. You cannot uninstall a data product if it is being used by at least one intelligent application.

Share a Data Product

Once a data product is installed to the Foundation Services of SAP BDC, you can share it with your SAP applications and supported external data platforms.

System administrators in the target systems manage and grant user access to the shared data products. Authorized users can query, consume, and enrich the shared data products with machine learning and generative AI tools.

There are some prerequisites to sharing data products. These are:

The data product release status and lifecycle status are both Active.
The data product's share status is Shareable.
The data product's functional status and the functional status for all its APIs are Current.

To share a data product, follow these steps:

In the SAP BDC Cockpit, choose Catalog and Marketplace.
On the catalog search page, use the filters or the search to find the data product you want to share and select it to open its details page.
Hint
Selecting the following filters will ensure that only data products that are ready to be shared are displayed:
Collection: Data Products
Lifecycle Status: Active
Release Status: Active
Share Status: Shareable
On the data product details page choose the tab Overview > Details to review the list of APIs.
For the API you want, check that the functional status is Current, and then choose the Share button.
Choose Add Target to share the data product
Choose the system you want to share to.
Choose Share.

A message appears letting you know that the share process has started. As the share process runs, you'll receive a notification letting you know that the process started and a notification of when it finishes with the result. You'll also see that the Manage Access dialog continually refreshes until the share process finishes.

The data product is now shared to the target system. On Overview tab of the Manage Access dialog, you'll see the list of target systems that the data product is shared to.

Note

You do not share a data product with Datasphere, you install a data product to a Datasphere space using the Datasphere catalog. The delta share protocol is not used.

Let's Summarize What You've Learned

In this lesson, you've learned how to install discover data products.

You've learned how to install a data product.
You've learned how to share a data product.

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