To enable Intelligent Enterprise, SAP is committed to innovate and provide industry-leading data warehousing technologies. SAP Data Warehousing provides continuous innovations in SAP Datasphere and SAP BW/4HANA.
SAP Datasphere is the latest innovation in the data warehousing portfolio of SAP. It is based on the SAP HANA Cloud. It follows a clear Data Warehouse as a Service (DWassS) approach in the public cloud with rapid release cycles. SAP Datasphere has the following characteristics.
Typical use cases of SAP Datasphere extend existing on-premise data warehouses by enhancing existing on-premise data with cloud sources. This defines new data models for broader insights. Another option is providing flexible data marts in control of business users to create new and agile models based on different sources. This removes the burden from IT departments. In addition, there are tools for connecting data without duplication across business applications. This provides a new and consistent view of the data.
SAP BW/4HANA is SAP's strategic solution for on-premise and private cloud deployment. Customers with SAP BW as a strategic asset benefit from future improvements and investment protection (at least, until 2040).
The Data Warehousing Strategy of SAP
SAP follows a clear strategy towards data warehousing in the cloud. However, customers need not follow this paradigm in a short period of time. Instead, SAP ensures full flexibility to enable a gradual extension of current investments and a move at each customer´s own pace. This path includes the following steps, as shown in the figure, a statement of direction of SAP:
- In the first step, customers can safeguard investments by lifting an existing scenarios to a private cloud environment.
- In the second step, SAP offers approaches to combine the strengths of SAP BW/4HANA with the innovation, openness, and self-service abilities of SAP Datasphere in a hybrid scenario (see 1 in the figure).
- In the third step, through the SAP BW bridge for SAP Datasphere (a new component released end of 2021), organizations re-use standard extractors for SAP´s on-premise sources and leverage SAP´s business content to stage the data including ABAP logic to share it with SAP Datasphere (see 2 in the figure).
- In the fourth and final step, SAP provides a tool support to migrate SAP BW 7.x and SAP BW/4HANA applications one by one to SAP BW bridge.
SAP's Data Warehouse approaches are not isolated concepts. SAP puts a special focus on providing options to integrate them with each other. The interoperability of the application-driven approaches of SAP BW/4HANA with SAP HANA data models is based on external SAP HANA Views generated from InfoProviders and from integration options for SAP HANA artifacts in SAP BW/4HANA.
SAP Datasphere provides integration options. As a result, it also provides hybrid use cases:
- Federated or replicated data consumption scenarios for SAP BW or SAP BW/4HANA using the following components:
- SAP ABAP connection to InfoProviders, InfoObject Characteristics and Queries (released as InfoProviders) or ABAP Dictionary tables
- SAP HANA connection to database tables or SAP HANA Calculation Views (incl. external SAP HANA Views generated in SAP BW 7.5 on HANA or SAP BW/4HANA)
- Federated so-called Business Semantics integration scenarios using SAP BW/4HANA Model Transfer connection, which SAP BW/4HANA 2.0 SP07 (and onwards) provides. SAP BW/4HANA provides business semantics of BW Queries and InfoProviders to be consumed in SAP Datasphere. A BW Query transfers as a number of native SAP Datasphere entities (such as KPI and analytic model) and the SAP BW/4HANA system only acts as a remote data source. The SAP HANA engines of SAP Datasphere manage the calculation and consumption.