What’s new in Data Services 4.1

In this blog I’m going to focus on some of the new features in Data Services 4.1.

Lets jump straight into the new features.

When designing, developers can now preview the results of the transform. So no need to execute the data flow first and view the results.

There is a new transform for manipulating nested data. This will be useful for working with XML, iDocs, BAPI calls and Web Service calls.

In previous versions of Data Services, when using ABAP data flow in the background data was transfered to a file, data services would then read this file to get the data. In 4.1 we can bypass that by making use of RFC connection. This allows us to stream the data directly from SAP to Data Services. No need for staging data in files anymore.

Data services 4.1 now supports Hadoop as a sources and target.

Within this release there is a new eclipse based user interface tool known as data services workbench. This tool can be used to easliy transfer tables and the data within the tables into HANA, IQ or Terradata. The advantage of this tool is we do not need to create all the data flows, mapping, etc. It will create it automatically in the background. Also data services workbench can monitor loads within the workbench.

The monitor sample rate is now time based instead of row based. There has also been improvements to what is written to the logs, now contains CPU usage for each transfom and input row buffer utilization % for each transform.

Enhanced HANA support including

• Repository support for HANA.
• Bulk updates – your updates can now be at the same speed as your inserts. Updates are now pushed down to the in-memory database
• Support for stored procedures – you can call stored procedures from within your DS jobs.

There are a few other features, but these were the main features that caught my eye.

Hope you enjoyed reading the blog 🙂

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