There are many scenarios out there, leveraging Non-SAP sources in SAP Analytics Cloud reporting. As part of our Analytics portfolio, SAP HANA with its smart data integration & smart data access capabilities is one of the popular solution options to connect the data to SAP Analytics Cloud.
In this blog post, I will show you how easy it is to leverage SAP Data Warehouse Cloud capabilities instead and what additional benefits you can gain out of it.
Current Challenges
There are two major challenges when it comes to the usage of SAP HANA with its federation capabilities:
- SAP HANA smart data integration & smart data access is not a direct cloud connection
Imagine you want to integrate existing cloud data in SAP Analytics Cloud, e.g. Odata services or some data in one of the big hyperscaler cloud environments. Even if you would not choose to use an On-premise SAP HANA, you would need to deploy a DataProvisioning Agent somewhere as well. In a lot of setups, this would lead to a dataflow like Cloud >> Onpremise >> Cloud, which is not the best approach
- UX is not suited for data-savvy analysts
When choosing to use SAP HANA smart data integration & smart data access based approach, your users need to leverage the SAP HANA development workbench, which is targeted to real developers. It is not convenient for a data analyst to work in that environment
How does it work with SAP Data Warehouse Cloud?
For these scenarios we can leverage a set of services which are part of our SAP Data Warehouse Cloud offering.
Our SAP Data Warehouse Cloud offering comes with a big set of connectivity options – apart from our tight connection to SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW), SAP HANA and other SAP solutions, we have a broad range of options for Non-SAP datasources as well.
SAP Data Warehouse Cloud Non-SAP Connections
The federation enabled connections are of primary interest in our scenario. A list of all supported connections is available in our
SAP Help.
While there are still some connections, leveraging Data Provisioning Agent in between, we offer a direct connection to many cloud services already and plan to extend this in future as well.
This is already tackling a major challenge mentioned above and provide a cloud ready, direct connection to other cloud services.
Providing a space for the end-user as playground for their own data integrations, a straight forward UX workflow and a great & seamless integration with SAP Analytics Cloud, enables your users to expand their usage.
To showcase the Ease of workflow, I just created a short walk-through in 3 minutes, connecting the famous Northwind OData service, creating a view & consuming it in SAP Analytics Cloud:
There are other examples on our Discovery Center as well, e.g. connecting to
Amazon Athena,
Google BigQuery or
Azure Data Explorer.
Additional benefits
Leveraging SAP Data Warehouse Cloud as a thin layer between SAP Analytics Cloud and your datasource, gives a lot of flexibility when the usecase matures.
You can easily extend the usecases by our unique SAP Data Warehouse Cloud capabilities like extended modeling, dataflows, data access restrictions, cataloging, data marketplace, intelligent lookup,…
Example:
If you recognize that you are experiencing performance challenges, because you are fishing around in your big data lake, you can easily take snapshots of what is of interest for your dashboards and gain high-speed access to it.
Summary
Everything you have seen in this blog is already available today and you can easily start playing around e.g. with a
SAP Data Warehouse Cloud trial
Apart from what is working today, you can expect the integration between our SAP Analytics Cloud & SAP Data Warehouse Cloud offering to become even more integrated in the near future.
That way you can easily expand the connectivity of SAP Analytics Cloud & use the full power of our Unified Data & Analytics portfolio.
Many thanks for your interest in the topic and I hope you like it. Please share your feedback in the comments and let me know if you have any questions. If you want to read more blogs on the interplay of SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Data Warehouse Cloud in the future, make sure to follow me.
Stay safe,
Tobias