Identifying Key Roles of Team Members

The SAP HANA Administrator is responsible for the deployment and monitoring of the SAP HANA Cloud service.

SAP HANA Cloud Administrator

If a migration from an on-premise database to SAP HANA Cloud is required, the administrator should develop skills around the tooling available to automate and ensure a successful migration.

A key responsibility of the administrator is the ensure that SAP HANA Cloud is fully available. This means developing and implementing a fail-over approach. This might include the setting up of redundant backup servers (scale-out).

SAP HANA Cloud provides the SPA HANA Cockpit for monitoring and tracing. Administrators should learn how to use these tools so they can ensure applications that run on SAP HANA Cloud are fully optimized.

With SAP HANA Cloud, the role of the administrator is significantly reduced compared to the on-premise deployment of SAP HANA. This is because the installation of SAP HANA hardware and software is not required. SAP HANA Cloud is deployed using a simple interface and requires no IT skills. But the administrator will certainly be involved with sizing the required cloud tenant and that includes the database memory disk and also if required the data lake. They will also be needed to support the connection of on-premise and other cloud applications to SAP HANA Cloud. But the day to day administration tasks of keeping SAP HANA running, plus backups are the responsibility of SAP or hosting partners and this is the big difference between cloud and on-premise platforms.

The SAP HANA Cloud data modeler is responsible for building the virtual data layer in the SAP HANA Cloud database. This is built mainly from calculation views but can also include other database artifacts such as user-defined functions and procedures. The most important skill of a data modeler is calculation view development. A simple calculation view is easily created but it takes a lot of experience and training to understand how to develop high-performance, yet easy-to-maintain models, that exploit the full potential of the SAP HANA Cloud in-memory database.

SAP HANA Cloud Modeler

SAP HANA Cloud data modelers should also be familiar with SQL as they will be using this language to develop custom logic to extend the standard capabilities of the calculation views. SQL is also used to test and trace the execution of the calculation views, so again, this role requires a solid understanding of SQL.

Beyond core modeling using calculation views, data modelers should also develop skills in the advanced SAP HANA data modeling topics such as spatial, predictive and graph data processing. SAP HANA Cloud is a powerful data processing platform and a data modeler who is able to develop sophisticated models that exploit all types of data is a valuable member of an SAP HANA Cloud development team.

The data modeling role often overlaps with the role of an application developer because most applications require some sort of analytical processing. The analytic processing part of an application is best handled by developing and consuming data models using the provided SAP HANA Cloud database artifacts such as calculation views and SQL based models, instead of handling the data processing logic within the application code. The application developers usually focus on writing application and UI code and tend not to be specialists in complex data modeling. Application developers often need to enlist the support of the dedicated SAP HANA Cloud data modeler when data modeling requirements become complex.

Security might also be an area of overlap with the team members who take care of this part of the implementation. Protecting the data from unauthorized access can be seen as a job for the data modeler who builds special database artifacts called Analytic Privileges to provide the rules for data access for each user / role. However, this might also be the responsibility of the security experts in the team. But whoever takes ownership of this task, collaboration is essential between the security experts and data modelers.

The role of the application developer is to build cloud applications using development languages.

Application Developer role

SAP HANA Cloud provides the tools to support the developer. The main tool is the Business Application Studio. This tool is used to develop cloud foundry applications in multiple languages.

The skills needed depend on the languages chosen for the application development. SAP HANA Cloud on Cloud Foundry allows multiple languages to be used to create the various tiers of the stack: UI, application and the database. Languages can includes, JAVA, Noed.JS, Python ,SQL and Core Data Services (CDS).

The security role is often taken over by the administrator. But as rules tighten around data privacy and data access, organizations often employ dedicated security experts to take on this role.

SAP HANA Cloud Security role

The security role covers many different areas of SAP HANA Cloud. The main to areas related to security are authentication (who has access) and authorization (what can be accessed).

Security also covers the increasingly important topic of data governance and compliance. SAP HANA Cloud includes many features and tools to ensure cloud applications are built to be secure and yet easily accessible by those who should have access.

The cloud providers take care of the protection of customer's data from unwanted outside access, but the customer still plays a key role in managing the levels of internal access to apps and data.

As organizations acquire more data than even before, and data driven applications become the norm, data management becomes a major topic. There are many tools provided by SAP HANA Cloud to manage data and this has now become a recognized role in an SAP HANA Cloud development project.

SAP HANA Cloud data architect

In the past, IT would take the role of data architects, providing storage capacity as needed and implementing archiving solutions. But the data requirements of applications have become more sophisticated and we expect access to data from all sources and in real-time, in addition to access to data lakes. As data and its smart utilization is increasingly recognized as the competitive advantage of a business, new roles have appeared in organization such as Data Manager or Data Architect.

SAP HANA Cloud provides tools for data connection, integration and cleansing across on-premise and cloud data sources. Working with these specialist tools requires skills that are often not found in the other SAP HANA Cloud roles.

The data architect learn to work with data management tools that are native to SAP HANA (SDI, SDA, NSE and so on) and also tools that can integrate with SAP HANA (SAP PI, SAP Data Services, SAP LT and so on.)