Ever wondered how to perform real-time analytics and aggregation on data in your current existing SAP system today?

As an example typically large amounts of data exist for sales document flows, material data, accounting documents amongst others for which you may want to use holistic aggregate functions.

Without having to migrate your current SAP version to HANA today you can already start using your transactional data as it happens and combine with historical data for real-time data retrieval and analytics.

How about putting some extra flavor on your data with high-performance views which require no functional change into your current system and are easily accessible, secure and efficiently managed?

Tables can have very large amount of data which may exceed many GB in size. The limit of the internal table will lead to short dump while querying. If you want to report on transactional data this is now transferred in batch overnight and extracted via reporting tools.

In your road to SAP S/4HANA and SAP BW/4HANA you can utilize your current SAP Solution Manager more effectively. New technologies and disruptive innovations like SAP HANA database can be quickly brought to productive use in an innovative platform in the cloud.

If you use SAP Landscape Transformation Replication server as Add-On this enables the replication of data into any HANA tenant database from which data can be retrieved easily as with an application table. This enables all the available data retrieval functionality which is ready for future re-use before your future SAP upgrade towards HANA database, while remaining your single source of truth (SSOT).

In practice, a commonly used setup is to use your existing Solution Manager to replicate data from your current SAP system towards an HANA tenant database which is managed in a secure zone. This is preferably a cloud solution which scales easily, can be made available instantly and high-performance computing (HPC) is generally available.

How does it work?

In your current SAP system transactions perform data changes which are then triggered via a master job and replicated towards the HANA database tenant. This data can be securely accessed via views. You can filter the data that is transferred to the target system by using field and mapping rules.

The initial load process

To retrieve historical data the required tables need to be added individually and loaded once. For both large and small tables different reading types exist based on which the initial load of tables can be performance optimized to reduce the time or limit resource consumption for the initial load.

The replication process

After the load of historical data the replication process is used to keep the data synchronized between your current SAP system and the target HANA tenant database. In real time replication mode change logging tables are constantly checked for new delta. In practice, these events happen after an update and are transparent for end-users as these are commonly executed in idle time after processing.

Reporting

It will be non-technical end users who will consume views to visualize different business scenarios. As a best practice, you need to use reporting tools which can connect to the HANA database and retrieve data securely. Views can be created in HANA studio for data access and re-used when your planned SAP system migration towards HANA is finished.

This does not only ease an implementation scenario but would also help in getting familiarized with HANA and cloud architecture. The perfect choice as a starting point for your Operational Data Provisioning infrastructure.

Is your company planning solutions based upon SAP HANA database and are you searching for best practices or want to start developing HANA views for future re-use? Feel free to contact us.