NOTE:  This offering has now exited beta and is now generally available to customers

You can find more information in the blog on SAP Data Quality Management, microservices General Availability.

What is “SAP Data Quality Management, microservices for location data”?

SAP Data Quality Management, microservices allows developers to embed data cleansing and enrichment services within any business process or application with a self-service, right-sized consumption model.

This is a new offering from SAP currently available as beta on the SAP Cloud Platform, developer edition. 

This offering provides HTTP/JSON-based services running on SAP HANA Cloud Platform.  Developers can simply integrate these services into their own applications to provide address cleansing/validation, geocoding, and reverse geocoding capabilities.  Below is a summary of functionality provided in the beta.

Key Capabilities – 3 Services provided in the beta offering

• Address Cleansing
  • Verify address per postal authority reference data as correct
  • Standardize the way the address looks and is structured
  • Correct components of an address if incorrect
  • Enhance an address with missing attributes
  • Assign diagnostic codes which describe why incorrect or what was corrected
• Geocoding
  • Append latitude and longitude given an address
• Reverse Geocoding
  • Provide address(es) given a latitude and longitude

We are hoping to get some early feedback on this service and if you have additional questions or feedback please post some comments here.

We are planning to provide pre-built integrations of these services in other applications from SAP which will provide a very simple way to consume this functionality.  More to come on that in the future.   If you have an application from SAP and you wish we provided these or other data quality type services within that application please let us know as well!  These capabilities are just our starting point.

If you are an ASUG member can you find a recent recorded webinar and presentation on this offering:   https://discuss.asug.com/docs/DOC-46194

What countries/languages do we support with this Beta offering?

This is available in the documentation provided for the service during beta which can be found here:  Developer Guide

We are working on supporting additional countries/languages for our general release and beyond.

What are the benefits of this offering?

• Simple consumption model in the Cloud.  HTTP/JSON-based services.
• Integration w/ many SAP Applications in the future
• Leading solution w/ 20+ years of experience in address cleansing and geocoding capabilities (technology acquired from Firstlogic/BusinessObjects)
• Strong partnerships with many worldwide postal authorities and data providers
• Complementary offering to our on-premise offerings in SAP Data Services and SAP HANA, smart data quality (SDQ)

How is this different than what’s offered in SAP Data Services or SAP HANA, smart data quality?

Some of you who are familiar with SAP Data Services or HANA SDQ may be asking how is this offering similar or different than those solutions.

• Leveraging the same core software engines in Data Services and HANA SDQ
• Similar functionality and behavior as our on-premise offerings
• Services in the cloud will provide the following benefits
  • No downloads/updates of reference data (directories) – all managed by SAP in the Cloud
  • Cloud pricing model(s) to provide more options and flexibility in consuming this functionality as needed (more to come after beta)
  • Simple API
  • No additional products/infrastructure needed

If you didn’t know that SAP offered these capabilities in other products here is more information on Data Services and HANA SDQ:

Data Services: 

Data Quality – Enterprise Information Management – SCN Wiki

Geocoder Transform – Enterprise Information Management – SCN Wiki

Global Address Cleanse Transform – Enterprise Information Management – SCN Wiki

HANA SDQ:

SAP HANA smart data integration & smart data quality – YouTube

SAP HANA Academy – Smart Data Quality: Address Cleanse Transformation Basics [SPS09] – YouTube

SAP HANA Academy – Smart Data Quality: Geocode Transformation Basics [SPS09] – YouTube

SAP HANA Academy – Smart Data Quality: Reverse Geocode [SPS 11] – YouTube

How do I get access to use the beta?

1.  Get an SAP Cloud Platform, developer edition account

Go here:  Try SAP Cloud Platform

Ensure you check “Enable Beta Features” for your account once you have access to SAP Cloud Platform Cockpit.

First select the edit button for your account on SCP, developer edition.  You can get to this screen below by selecting the first drop down at the top of the SCP Cockpit and selecting the “Europe(Trial)” data center which relates to the SCP, developer edition.   Then select the pencil icon for your trial account as seen below.

Then select “Enable Beta Features” for that account and save:

2. Enable our service for your account

Browse to “services” in SAP Cloud Platform Cockpit.

Under the “Business Services” category you’ll see a tile for “Data Quality Microservices”

Click on the tile and on the next screen you will see an “Enable” button.  Select that.

Once enabled you are ready to go.

3.  Review the Documentation

You will see a link on the service page where you enabled our service to the documentation.

Or you can directly access here:

Developer Guide (Beta)

Examples of calling the Service(s)

Postman

We have recently posted some scripts which can be used with the Postman Service utility (www.getpostman.com).

You can find these sample scripts and how to configure them for use with your SCP, developer edition account and our microservices here at the public SAP Github repository:

https://github.com/SAP/cloud-dqm-sample-payloads

Java Example

There is also a sample JAVA application which you can find a blog post here:
https://blogs.sap.com/2016/07/11/test-drive-the-new-dqaas/

However, use this Github repository instead going forward vs. the one mentioned in this blog:
https://github.com/SAP/SAP-cloud-dqm-sample-java

SAP Data Services:

If you are an SAP Data Services customer we have recently introduced a built-in transformation which integrates these microservices.  This is included in the recent release SAP Data Services 4.2 SP8.
Example Data Services Jobs (Blueprints) can be found here:
https://wiki.scn.sap.com/wiki/display/EIM/SAP+Data+Services+Blueprints

You can find more information in the official documentation here starting on page 754:
http://help.sap.com/businessobject/product_guides/sbods42/en/ds_42_reference_en.pdf

Limitations

This service is limited to 90 days of usage or 1000 transactions per country.  Tracking starts with the first transaction you make to the service.