In today's era of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and multi-cloud landscapes, the open data ecosystem supports SAP's business data fabric strategy to enable seamless and scalable access to mission-critical business data with the semantics and business context preserved. SAP Business Data Cloud operationalizes that principle by making data easier to discover, share, govern and model across all business processes and across the hybrid cloud landscape.
Within the business data fabric, open data ecosystem via SAP Business Data Cloud Connect (BDC Connect) provides native integration with external platforms and supports real-time data federation so that immediate access is possible without physical data movement.
The open data ecosystem strategy of SAP Business Data Cloud answers the challenge of having to move data around by moving away from building data pipelines and Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) towards governed, shared data products exchanged over open-source Delta Share protocol.
BDC Connect is the SAP service that enables secure and seamless, zero-copy sharing of semantically rich SAP data into customers' existing data platform environments, and the sharing of external data back into SAP Business Data Cloud. It breaks down silos and provides real-time access to trusted, business-ready data, creating a unified business data fabric for enhanced analytics and AI.
BDC Connect operates on the Object Store layer of SAP Business Data Cloud where data products are materialized. It then exposes and consumes those data products using the open Delta Share protocol, enabling interoperability across different computing platforms, cloud environments and applications.
Delta Sharing provides:
- Zero-copy data access: data is not moved or copied; consumers read up-to-date data from the source.
- Central governance: controlled access and scalable sharing.
- Scalable performance: able to handle billions of rows.
- Auditable data access: fully auditable access, critical for SOX, GDPR and industry compliance.
Note
Delta Sharing is an open protocol for sharing data stored in cloud-based data lake tables. It was pioneered by Databricks in 2022 to address the problems of data replication: data consistency and freshness, cost explosion (storage duplication, egress), engineering effort to build and maintain pipelines, and governance/compliance risk.
What BDC Connect enables?
BDC Connect enables zero-copy, bi-directional data exchange and sharing of managed data products between SAP Business Data Cloud and partner platforms.
The core capabilities of BDC Connect are:
- Zero-copy, bi-directional data access between SAP Business Data Cloud and external partner platforms.
- Sharing of SAP managed data products (Foundation Services layer) and custom data products (SAP Datasphere Object Store) between partner platforms.
- Sharing of ML/AI-enriched or derived data products from partner platforms back into SAP Business Data Cloud, where they become discoverable in the SAP Business Data Cloud Catalog.
- Near real-time metadata changes so that consumers always have access to the most current information.
- Discoverability via the SAP Business Data Cloud Catalog on the SAP side and the partner's own catalog.
Note
Prefer BDC Connect when the integration is between data products and the goal is a governed, zero-copy AI/analytics experience.
Let's Summarize What You've Learned
This lesson introduces the open data ecosystem and BDC Connect. It explains how they operationalize SAP’s business data fabric strategy to provide seamless, governed, and real-time access to business data across hybrid cloud environments.
- SAP’s open data ecosystem enables scalable, semantic data access through a unified business data fabric.
- BDC Connect provides bi-directional, zero-copy sharing to eliminate the need for data replication.
- The Delta Sharing protocol replaces traditional ETL pipelines with secure, governed data products.
- Centralized governance ensures high-performance, auditable data access that meets strict compliance standards.
- Integrated catalogs allow for real-time discovery and sharing of AI-enriched data across hybrid cloud environments.