Sharing SAP BW Data as Custom Data Product

Objective

After completing this lesson, you will be able to use a custom data product on SAP BW data in SAP Databricks.

Share SAP BW Data with SAP Databricks

After the data product has been created on a local table (file), let's see how the data product can be shared with SAP Databricks.

Share Data Product

To make a data product available for consumption in SAP Databricks, you have the following options:

  • Share the data product from the SAP Business Data Cloud catalog.
  • Create a catalog from the Delta Share associated with the desired data product in SAP Databricks.

If you share the data product from the SAP Business Data Cloud catalog, you must specify the following information:

  • Target System: SAP Databricks.

  • Workspace: a SAP Databricks deployment in the cloud that functions as an environment for your team to access SAP Databricks assets (like notebooks, tables, views, SQL queries, and so on). Depending on its needs, an organization can choose to have multiple workspaces or just one.

  • Share Name: only lowercase allowed.

The picture shows a screenshot of the Data Products app with the data product ZCASHACT_BW_ACT open. It shows a pop up “Manage Access: ZCASHACT_BW_ACT”, which shows fields like: API: ZCASHACT_BW_ACT, Target System: databricks-7fe31bcf, System ID: dcd30b9-5e0f-466c-aed1-2b0231d44447, Share Name: sapbw_actual_cashflow_data and Workspace: workspace_bw . Action buttons shown are Share and Cancel; there’s also a Close button at the bottom .

In the following exercise, you will share a data product to SAP Databricks.

Engineer and Share Data in SAP Databricks

SAP Databricks provides advanced data engineering capabilities to SAP Business Data Cloud.

A data scientist can consume, query, process, and transform data products in SAP Databricks, including working with SQL and Python notebooks for various data science and AI/ML projects.

Let’s have a look at the steps which are taken by the data scientist, to perform data analysis on the shared SAP BW data.

  1. Locate the shared data product: in SAP Databricks, the data product is accessible as a delta table in the Unity Catalog. The schema and the table (DDS.....) can be retrieved in the folder "Delta Share Received".

  2. Perform advanced data engineering using notebooks. For example these tasks:

    • Data preparation
    • Data training
    • Data forecasting
    • Writing forecast results to a delta table
  3. Share the delta table via delta sharing: Delta sharing is an open protocol for secure sharing of delta tables. SAP Business Data Cloud supports delta sharing and allows user data sets, represented as shares, to be shared securely. SAP Business Data Cloud SDK is used to create a delta share in SAP Databricks, which includes the delta table and SAP Business Data Cloud as a recipient.

  4. Publish the delta share as a data product to SAP Business Data Cloud: To allow the discovery of the shared data in SAP Business Data Cloud, SAP Business Data Cloud SDK is used in SAP Databricks to describe the delta share with the following metadata:

    • ORD: the Open Resource Discovery protocol allows applications and services to self-describe their resources and capabilities. It facilitates cross consumption of resources and capabilities between different systems through a common standard interface.

    • CSN: a standardized format for configuring and describing shares within a network.

    After publishing, the data product is available in the Catalog of SAP Business Data Cloud.

The picture shows a screenshot of a data product named cashflow prediction share, displayed using the Catalog & Marketplace. It shows field like: Business Name: cashflow prediction share, Category: Business Object, Lifecycle Status: Active, Version: 1.0.0 and ORD ID: sap.databricks:dataProduct:cashflow_prediction_share:v1.