Describing Data Products

Data products are at the heart of SAP Business Data Cloud. They are the individual building blocks of the data platform and consist of curated business data and associated metadata that has been extracted from SAP and non-SAP applications.

The meta data is essential as it provides the meaning of the data.

For SAP applications, SAP manages all aspects of the data extraction from the source system to SAP BDC. Customers simply consume the ready-to-use data products in their analytical applications. A data products provides business-ready data with no preparation tasks needed by IT.

Data products always include these characteristics:

• Business Data Sets - a data product contains either transaction or master data that is derived from one or more tables or views from the source application, to form a meaningful data set including all essential fields.
• Well Described - each data product includes the associated meta data that provides the semantics (meaning) of the data.
• Easily Consumable - data products can be securely shared with data platforms and BI tools without the need to physically copy data.
• Discoverable - data products are exposed via catalogs so that the business users can easily discover them.

Although individual data products provide useful information, they are usually combined with other data products using data modeling tools to generate comprehensive data sets that span different entities.

A key aspect of data products is that they are highly reusable. They can be used to build analytics, power AI co-pilots, business planning or to build AI agents.

Once a data product has been generated and stored in SAP BDC, it becomes the single source of data to all consuming applications.

Let's look at an example of a data product.

SAP deliver the data product Sales Order from the source application SAP S/4HANA. This data product includes all the fields that relate to a sales order, such as transaction id, customer, delivery date, material ordered, quantity, and so on. Many source tables and ABAP CDS views are used to create this data product. SAP ensures that all information needed to get the complete picture of a sales order is included in the data product.

A data products doesn't just deliver the raw business data, it also delivers the meta data. The metadata is very important because it provides the meaning of the data which we call semantics . Semantics provide a description of the data, the rules for how the data should be consumed, and associations between fields. In the Sales Order data product, the field material, which is identified only by a meaningless material id also provides the metadata that includes the description of the material in multiple languages, the type of material, the supplier and country of origin of the material, and the currency used to value the material. Metadata provides the essential semantics that are required to fully understand the meaning of the data. Without the valuable meta data, we simply have meaningless raw data.

Data products arrive in SAP BDC in their basic form containing only the essential data for each business entity. Within SAP BDC the basic data products, known as primary data products are combined with other primary data products to form derived data products. These derived data products provide a broader scope that might be more useful to a business user or to an AI application. There can be even more layers on top to combine the derived data products to generate more enriched data products ready for consumption. The goal is to develop layers of data products that are highly reusable.

The data products delivered by SAP are called SAP-managed data products. Customers can create their own data products. These are called customer-managed data products. Partners also play an important role in developing industry-based data products. These are partner-managed data products.

Data products are grouped by Data Packages. Data Packages make it easy to manage data products. For example, instead of activating a long list of data products one by one, you can simply activate the Data Package which contains all related data products.

SAP has already developed a very large number of data products from all SAP applications and will continue until all applications are covered.

To support the discovery of data products, SAP provides search tools in the SAP BDC Cockpit. The SAP BDC Cockpit displays data products that are available based on the connected source systems and the entitlements the customer has purchased.

Once a data product has been discovered in the SAP BDC Cockpit, it can be installed by either activating the individual data product, or by activating the Data Package to which the data product belongs. The installation tasks are fully automated and are carried out in the background. Once the data product is ready to use, its status will change to active and the data product is ready to consume.

Data products provide the data to the SAP-delivered intelligent applications. When you install an intelligent application, the associated data products are automatically installed.

Most SAP customers extend the standard tables of their SAP applications with custom fields. Custom fields are automatically included in the data extraction and land in SAP BDC as part of the SAP-managed data product. However, custom fields are ignored by the SAP-provided data models built on top of SAP-managed data products. Customers should build their own custom data models if they want to use custom fields in their analytical applications.