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Author's profile photo Shady Hanna

Part 2 – SAP S/4HANA Cloud Data Integration Overview

After getting an overview and understanding of how Virtual Data Models (VDM) and ABAP Core Data Services (ABAP CDS Views) work in SAP S/4HANA, and the requirements needed for a CDS View to be extractable in my colleague Michael Sanjongco’s blog post Part 1 – SAP S/4HANA Cloud Data Integration to power your Intelligence Enterprise.

This blog will briefly explain the different components which play a role in exposing data from SAP S/4HANA Cloud, and the different options to connect SAP S/4HANA to target systems like SAP BW/4HANA, SAP Data Intelligence, and SAP Data Warehouse Cloud to be able to extract data to them, and achieve your extensibility and analytics scenarios.

Figure1: SAP S/4HANA Data Integration – Architectural Overview

Explaining the extraction mechanism from a bottom-up approach as shown in the Architectural Overview (figure 1):

  • Application Tables are the database tables that hold all business/configuration data. Data cannot be extracted directly from them
  • Internal CDS View Models are views built on top of Application Tables and/or other CDS Views for data modeling purposes
  • CDS Extraction views are the extraction-enabled CDS Views that are built on top of associations of Application Tables and/or other CDS Views, depending on what the CDS View itself is exposing. They are used for data extraction from SAP S/4HANA
  • Extraction runtime is the middleware between the CDS Views and target systems. It contains different engines like Operational Data Provisioning (ODP)/Operational Delta Queue (ODQ), Change Data Capture (CDC), and Reconstruction. They are responsible to convert, expose and transfer the data to the respective API which the target system can communicate with; those are reflected both in the communication scenarios configured in SAP S/4HANA Cloud, and the respective connection type/configuration on the target system as it will be explained in detail in the next blogs

The table below shows the different integration scenarios, their corresponding communication scenario(s), connection types, best practices to guide you on how to set up the integration scenario, and documentation of different applications that can be used in target systems to extract SAP S/4HANA Cloud Data from:

Scenario Target System Communication Scenario API Protocol Scope Item Connection Types Documentation
1

SAP BW/4HANA

 

 

SAP_COM_0042 SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) Remote Function Call (RFC) 35D

Transferring Data from SAP Systems  via ODP (ABAP CDS Views)

 

SAP Business Warehouse powered by SAP HANA
2 SAP Data Intelligence SAP_COM_0532 ABAP Pipeline Websocket RFC 53M ABAP Connection

ABAP CDS Reader Operator

 

SAP_COM_0531 Cloud Data Integration (CDI) oData Cloud Data Integration Cloud Data Integration Consumer
3 SAP Data Warehouse Cloud SAP_COM_0532 ABAP Pipeline Websocket RFC 53L S/4HANA Cloud (Recommended)

· Replicating Data and Monitoring Remote Tables requires Data Provisioning Agent (DP Agent)

· Extraction through data flows

SAP_COM_0532 ABAP Pipeline Websocket RFC SAP ABAP connection (Supports Data Flows only)
SAP_COM_0531 CDI oData Cloud Data Integration

You can use Data Flows and Remote Tables in SAP Data Warehouse Cloud to preview the data exposed by the ABAP CDS Views before extracting them. As for SAP Data Intelligence, you can use the Metadata Explorer to have a metadata analysis for the ABAP CDS Views (e.g. ABAP CDS Views fields and field types).

In the next blogs, we will discuss in detail each of the S/4HANA Cloud Integration scenarios, how you can set them up and make the best use of them.

We would be happy to receive your feedback in the blog post comments section below and answer all your questions under the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Q&A area.

See you in our next blog posts.

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      17 Comments
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      Author's profile photo Nico Gaertner
      Nico Gaertner

      Hi Shady,

      Nice blog.

      Just a comment: Data Preview or Analysis of CDS View Data in the Metadata Explorer does not work for connections to S/4 HANA Cloud - only display of Metadata is supported.

      Best Regards,

      Nico

      Author's profile photo Shady Hanna
      Shady Hanna
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Nico,

      Thank you so much for your feedback.

      Yes, I agree with you, it was possible before but not anymore. I will update my blog accordingly.

      Many thanks for your feedback again,

      Best Regards,

      Shady

      Author's profile photo Xavier Polo
      Xavier Polo

      We are having problems accessing some CDS views.
      In the simplest scenario, as remote tables, in the connection to S/4HANA Cloud we do not see the CDS I_PaymentTermsText, however we see the CDS I_CustomerPaymentTermsText, and both have the annotation @Analytics.dataextraction.enabled: true.

      It is supposed that the indispensable requirement is that the CDS has that annotation. Is there any other?

      edited: I can see both in I_DataExtractionEnabledView

      Thanks in advance

      Author's profile photo Shady Hanna
      Shady Hanna
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Xavier,

      Thank you for your comment.

      No there are no other requirements. I agree both CDS Views are extraction enabled, I tried to access them from an SAP Data Warehouse Cloud system using the View Builder and Remote Tables, I was able to. May I ask how are you trying to access those CDS Views?

       

      Thank you,
      Best Regards,

      Shady

       

       

       

       

       

      Author's profile photo Xavier Polo
      Xavier Polo

      Of course, thanks for your interest.

      From View Builder, using a Cloud Data Integration connection. This project is prior to the existence of a specific connection type for S/4HANA Cloud.

      Edited:

      I have tried to create a new S/4 HANA Cloud connection, but I get the same result.

      It seems that it only shows the CDS that are released by SAP, but I'm not sure if that's the cause, because I remember using other not released CDS in the past.

      In this case, I_PaymentTermsText is not released and I_CustomerPaymentTermsText is released.

      Best Regards,

      Author's profile photo Shady Hanna
      Shady Hanna
      Blog Post Author

      You are welcome Xavier.

      Yes, I can confirm that the ABAP CDS View has to be C1-Released  (to guarantee that the CDS View remains stable even if the underlying CDS Views/tables structures have been changed) and extraction enabled in order to access it from SAP Data Warehouse Cloud.

      Please follow this link for more information about the stability contracts.

      Thank you,

      Best Regards,

      Shady

       

      Author's profile photo Xavier Polo
      Xavier Polo

      ok, thanks for the information.

      Best regards,

      Author's profile photo Xavier Polo
      Xavier Polo

      Shady Hanna

      We found a problem with deprecated views, as the ReleasedStatus changes from Released to Deprecated, they disappears from DWC, which does not give us time to make the changes to use the substitute CDS.

      This is not a problem within S/4HANA because they can continue to use the deprecated view for 12 months, but this is not the case when using it in DWC.

      Any advice?

      Thank you for your help.

      Author's profile photo Shady Hanna
      Shady Hanna
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Xavier Polo,

      We are currently working on it, to allow users to use the deprecated CDS Views until they are decommissioned. Currently, there is no workaround but to use the alternative CDS Views.

      Thank you,
      Best Regards,
      Shady

      Author's profile photo Xavier Polo
      Xavier Polo

      Thank you Shady Hanna

      Author's profile photo Michael Sanjongco
      Michael Sanjongco

      FYI - To request CDS Views to be extraction enabled from SAP S/4HANA Cloud, please go to the Customer Influence Portal.

      Author's profile photo Sundar Vembu
      Sundar Vembu

      Great article. Question, are there any references/links on how to setup real time replication from S/4 HANA cloud to SAP HANA Cloud - HANA DB ?

      Thank you.

      Author's profile photo Michael Sanjongco
      Michael Sanjongco

      Hi Sundar,

       

      The recommended way to replicate data from SAP S/4HANA Cloud to SAP HANA Cloud is by using SAP Data Intelligence. Here's a blog that describes the new feature.

       

      Kind Regards,

      mike

      Author's profile photo Sundar Vembu
      Sundar Vembu

      Thank you for your response Mike.

      Author's profile photo Garth Thomson
      Garth Thomson

      Hi there

       

      Great article! Do you know if these protocols have changed for S4 HANA Cloud recently?

      We have just gone through an upgrade of S4 Public Cloud and  S4 HANA - ODP Context ABAP_CDS ABAP Core Data Services is still working but S4 HANA - ODP Context SAPI DataSource Extractors has stopped working. We were using the latter to extract core components like 0Project Text which was working very well up until this point.

       

      Thanks in advance!

      Author's profile photo Michael Sanjongco
      Michael Sanjongco

      Hi Garth,

      Your specific use case was originally available but only for planning purposes and not mass data extraction. It has since been deprecated and you must switch to CDS Views for data extraction.

      Hope this helps and we apologize for any inconvenience.

      Kind Regards,

      mike

       

      Author's profile photo Ravi Condamoor
      Ravi Condamoor

      Can ODP be used with DI and S4Hana Cloud?  The table shown in the writeup above only mentions Websocket RFC/ ABAP CDS Reader and OData.