[SAP HANA Academy] HCI Data Services: Overview

[Former Member]

The SAP HANA Academy’s tahirhussain.babar provides a quick chalkboard overview of how data services works within SAP HANA Cloud Integration. Check out Bob’s tutorial video below.

(0:15 – 1:40) Overview of HCI

The SAP HANA Cloud Platform, a Platform-as-a-Service product, is used by companies, independent software vendors, startups and developers to create and test SAP HANA based cloud applications. SAP HANA Cloud Platform offers a range of available applications and database infrastructure services which you can use to develop and test your applications.

Along side that is the SAP HANA Cloud Integration, which facilitates the integration of business process and data across on-premise and cloud applications. For example moving data cloud to cloud from SAP HANA machines or from cloud to on-premise machines.

There are two major types of HCI. First there is SAP HANA Cloud Integration for Process Integration (PI), which allows you to intergrade different business processes spanning different companies, organizations or departments. This video series will cover SAP HANA Cloud Integration for Data Services. SAP HCI-DS allows you to efficiently and securely use extract, transform and load (ETL) tasks to move data between on-premise systems and the cloud.

(1:40 - 4:30)  Outline of HCI-DS

Imagine you have different datasets. In Bob’s example we have a SAP ERP or BW system, a Windows or Linux box with MySQL or Oracle, flat files on a Windows machine and data that comes from the cloud, which can be in OData format or in REST or SOAP format. So you might want to move the data from your on-premise MySQL database and store in a SAP HANA schema in HCP. This is called a task when using HCI-DS. Each of the ticked sources pictured below are called datastores. HCI-DS builds a connection to that individual datastore.

So technically we will install a data services agent on either a Windows or Linux machine. Bob recommends you install just one agent and it should be on a dedicated machine although in Bob’s example he’s installed it on the same Windows machine as his MySQL system. Installing multiple agents is possible if your data is located in different data centers at the customer site or you want fail over. One single agent can point to many different machines. The DS agents must also point to the OData connection or any WZDL or SuccessFactors agent.

Once you have built these agents you can use SAP HCI-DS to extract the data from your source system and load it into a SAP HANA schema in the SAP HANA Cloud Platform. The tasks can either be scheduled or executed manually.

This SAP HANA Academy playlist will show you how to install agents and how to build various datastores to the SAP ERP or BW system, or to a flat file or to an OData provider. Bob will show how to connect to a weather service in WSDL format. Then Bob will show how to build tasks which will extract the data from the various sources and will do some transformation in HCI-DS. Then finally Bob will walkthrough how to load the data into a SAP HANA schema in the SAP HANA Cloud Platform.

(4:30 – 7:45) Overview of What HCI-DS Looks Like

On the main SAP HANA Cloud Integration for Data Services page there are seven tabs. The first tab called get started gives you a link to available videos and resources including the agents guide. This will show how to preform the basic tasks you will do.

You will build projects which are like folders and these folders contain tasks. The projects tab shows all the tasks and projects. In Bob’s example he has one task that will move data from an ERP system into the SAP HANA Cloud Platform. Drilling into the task will show a data flow. In Bob’s example it shows a simple transform.

The datastores tab shows where the data comes from. Some examples are connecting to an ERP or a BW system, a SAP HANA system or flat files. For example if you have data in MySQL and you want to load it to the SAP HANA Cloud Platform using HCI-DS then you need to install an agent. This agent will sit as close as possible to your data source.

The dashboard tab will show you jobs that have successfully executed and those that had failed. There are two types of projects. One type runs in a development environment called sandbox. The other is in a production environment. When you have a task running in production it can be scheduled so you can preform batch jobs to load the data into SAP HANA Cloud Platform.

Learn much more about SAP HANA Cloud Integration for Data Services.

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