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When a Data Services question makes its way to one of us on the product management team, it is almost always about compatibility. Will DS work with…BI 4.1? BW 7.4? HANA SP7? SQL Server 2012?

Fortunately, you don’t have to wait for us to respond, as you can find out yourself. Listed below are the areas we get asked about most often regarding compatibility. Before we get to those, it is important to familiarize yourself with the most helpful resource out there, the Product Availability Matrix. which we lovingly refer to as PAM.


When someone calls us about compatibility, our response is usually, “Have you checked with PAM?” For Data Services, you can go directly to the detail document, 29 pages packed with glorious detail. If it’s in the PAM, you are good to go. The appendix of the PAM also lists server and disk size requirements, along with links to sizing BI/IPS.

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE AND IPS

By far, most questions we get are about DS dependency on BI or IPS. This an be a complex subject with lots of moving parts. Let’s try to simplify it. The following are compatible versions starting with DS 4.2 onwards:

  • BI 4.1 SP2 or higher

OR

  • IPS 4.1 SP2 or higher

You can see the version numbers are swapped between version and SP: DS 4.2 SP1 requires BI 4.1 SP2. I know what you’ll ask next: “Why can’t the DS team and the BI team get together and standardize on the same version numbers?” That is an excellent question. I wish I had a good answer.

SAP Note 1740516 has all the detail on tested and supported configurations of DS and BI/IPS. If you are still on an older version of DS, I strongly recommend that you review this note before you upgrade.

The next question usually is: “Can I install BI/IPS on a separate system?” SAP note 1740516 has the answer for this, too, in footnote 10. Whether you install BI/IPS separately or on the same server as DS depends on how you want to manage the DS users (and IS users, too, incidentally).  An excellent summary with discussion of best practices is here.

SAP HANA

Starting with DS 4.1, SAP HANA can be used as a repository as well as a source or target database. As of this writing, the latest version of HANA supported is 1.0 SP7 Rev 73, which requires DS 4.2 SP1 Patch 3. SAP KB Article 1600140 has all the details and the latest information. If you are starting out on a HANA project, be sure to bookmark that KB article and refer to it often.

Further, there is a growing list of tutorials on the SAP HANA Academy about using DS with HANA. To get the most out of your work with DS and HANA, I recommend reviewing this article on optimizing HANA with DS and IS.

SAP BUSINESS WAREHOUSE

For loading or reading BW, it is again a good idea to start with the PAM, specifically pages 18-19. There we see that with the RFC SDK 7.10 and JCO 3.0 clients (both of which are included with DS), DS is certified up to BW 7.4.

It can get complicated, though, and there are lots of details to know. I recommend reading chapter 5 of the DS Supplement for SAP to get a more comprehensive view of what is required and the proper configurations. If you are using DS 4.0 or 4.1 and connecting to Open Hub, you should review the patches that fix various issues in connecting. Another excellent overview to DS-BW integration can be found on SCN (an older version is here).

I hope the links in this article are useful to you. Thank you for using Data Services!

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