In March 2023, we enhanced SAP Datasphere with catalog capabilities to democratize data access and strengthen data-driven decision-making (launch blog). This feature facilitates the curation and organization of metadata harvested from various SAP data sources, assists in discovering curated data assets, and enables search and classification of these assets by users and data stewards. The catalog further enriches assets with business metadata, aiding organizations in their data governance journey. It connects to sources such as SAP Datasphere and SAP Analytics Cloud from its inception, retrieving metadata from a variety of assets within these systems, including but not limited to stories, models, insights, predictive scenarios, local tables, remote tables, views, and data actions.
Today we are happy to announce that we recently delivered a new enhancement that extends the coverage of our metadata harvesting with the support to connect and retrieve technical metadata from SAP Datasphere, SAP BW bridge.
SAP Datasphere, SAP BW bridge provides a path that eases the transition from existing SAP BW systems to an innovative infrastructure supported by SAP Datasphere. This helps organizations to reuse existing investments in SAP BW by allowing you to transfer and enable the rich feature set of extractors and ABAP code for access to legacy SAP on-premises systems, and to seamlessly transfer existing ETL processes within a dedicated space.
Feature Description
You can add an SAP Datasphere, SAP BW bridge system to the catalog to as a source to harvest metadata of the following objects:
- Advanced Data Store Objects
- Info Areas
- Composite Providers
- Info Objects
- Source Systems
- Data Sources
- Info Sources
- Transformations
Once extracted, these new objects can be enriched with business metadata and published to the catalog like any other assets.
Create a Connection to an SAP Datasphere, SAP BW bridge system
In this section, we will briefly show how to connect to an SAP Datasphere, SAP BW bridge system to harvest the metadata for the catalog.
Connect to your SAP Datasphere tenant and access the Monitoring page under the Catalog section in the left menu.
On the monitoring page, click “+” to create a new entry for a system.
Select SAP Datasphere, SAP BW bridge.
Click Create.
You can now configure which Info Areas you want to select and then save the configuration for this connected system.
Now you can sync to request the harvesting of the metadata related to the selected Info Areas that define the connection to the SAP Datasphere, SAP BW bridge system.
Interact with the catalog
In this section, we will briefly show how to search and interact with assets in the catalog that are from the SAP Datasphere, SAP BW bridge connected system.
As usual, navigate to the Catalog, and search for any content, but also now you can leverage the Info Areas as well as the Source Systems associated to the SAP Datasphere, SAP BW bridge connected system as structure to narrow down your search result.
The support of metadata harvesting also introduces new asset types which can be used to filter and narrow down your discovery of the available content.
Once you find (or locate) the asset you were looking for, you can review its properties and the column details when . Column details, for example for attributes also allow to easily navigate to other referenced info objects in the catalog to further discover the data.
Like any other asset in the catalog, you can also look at the lineage and impact analysis graph to see the other assets associated to it.
The lineage and impact analysis graph allows to navigate to the different assets to further discover the data available and their relationships.
Any of the existing feature to enrich the assets with business metadata such as descriptions, business glossary terms, KPIs, and Classification Tags can be used to further enhance the metadata for the SAP Datasphere, SAP BW bridge harvested metadata as described in this blog.
What’s Next?
Soon, for the SAP Datasphere, SAP BW bridge metadata harvesting, we will enable scheduling of the metadata harvesting to remove the need to manually sync that process. Additionally, we will add column groupings for the column details associated to the assets.
We will continue to extend the coverage of the SAP metadata we can harvest to continuously support organizations on their data governance journey.
I also want to share some additional resources for you around SAP Datasphere:
- Access to your free 30 day trial of SAP Datasphere
- Join SAP Datasphere community to see what’s new, ask questions, share your feedback, and more.
- SAP Datasphere product overview
- Documentation for SAP Datasphere catalog
- SAP Managed Tags:
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