External SAP HANA SQL View with SAP BW/4HANA 2.0

[miguel_peredozurcher]

Hello!

Now that BW/4 2.0 has been released, and I had some time I decided to try out some of the new features.

In this blog I’m focusing on this new feature: “Openness: SQL View for Look-ups on DataStoreObjects,” page 28 from here: https://www.sap.com/documents/2019/02/b079bb3f-3a7d-0010-87a3-c30de2ffd8ff.html



Before the 2.0 release, there was the note:

https://launchpad.support.sap.com/#/notes/1682131 - SAP BW tables in SAP HANA Information Views and ABAP CDS Views not supported

In a nutshell, “it is not supported to use an "active data" table of an SAP BW (a)DSO or a P/Q-table of an SAP BW InfoObject to build SAP HANA Attribute/Analytic/and Calculation Views by hand via the SAP HANA Modeler.”

From time to time I’ve noticed this happening in some systems I’ve worked with, and I understand the reasoning behind, but please keep in mind that is not allowed

For me the motivators for needing to use the ADSO views/tables were mainly:

• Mixed modeling scenarios. Do some joins operations combining the data in the ADSO and some Hana view or similar situations.


• Extracting to 3^rd party tools


• HANA Transformations (lookups)

Now with release 2.0 of BW/4, we have some views that are “legal” to use, and also remember that for exposing semantically rich views to SQL tools, you can use the RS2HANA framework, which also provides authorizations, this is achieved setting the “External HANA view” in a composite, more info here: https://help.sap.com/viewer/107a6e8a38b74ede94c833ca3b7b6f51/1.0.1/en-US/6633d851345c4770bd4e523701b...

The documentation I’ve found so far about this new views is the following:

https://launchpad.support.sap.com/#/notes/2723506 - External SAP HANA SQL View with SAP BW/4HANA 2.0

and

https://help.sap.com/viewer/107a6e8a38b74ede94c833ca3b7b6f51/2.0.0/en-US/1790df727298492a8c02671d183...

In this documentation, I only found a reference to a view: /<namespace>/A<name of the DataStore object>8

In my case, my ADSO technical name is ZFIGL

And I can see that three views got generated on the ABAP side:

/BIC/AZFIGL6                   View for Extraction from DataStore ZFIGL

/BIC/AZFIGL7                   View for Reporting for DataStore ZFIGL

/BIC/AZFIGL8                   View for external Access for DataStore ZFIGL

The views ending in 6 and 7 are generated in BW/4 1.0 (At least with SP10), but the one ending in 8 is the new one for BW/4 2.0

My wish for this blog in that everybody who is interested in this topic, put in the comments his questions, experiences, etc, with this new view, and at some time we create a wiki for this.

Cheers!