Overview of the SAP HANA Direct Extractor Connection

The SAP HANA Direct Extractor Connection (DXC) is a means for providing out-of-the-box foundational data models to SAP HANA, which are based on SAP Business Suite entities. DXC is also a data acquisition method forSAP HANA. The rationale for DXC is simple, low TCO data acquisition for SAP HANA leveraging existing delivered data models.

Customer projects can face significant complexity in modeling entities in SAP Business Suite systems. In many cases, data from various areas in SAP Business Suite systems requires application logic to represent the state of business documents appropriately. SAP Business Content DataSource Extractors have been available for many years as a basis for data modeling and data acquisition for SAP Business Warehouse. Now, with DXC, these SAP Business Content DataSource Extractors are available to deliver data directly to SAP HANA.

DXC is a batch-driven data acquisition technique; it is considered a form of extraction, transformation, and load, although its transformation capabilities are limited to using the user exit for extraction purposes. For more information, seehttp://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw70/helpdata/en/49/ae67401d4988448036b180dc9ec1e6/content.htm andhttp://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw70/helpdata/en/6e/fe6e420f00d242e10000000a1550b0/content.htm.

A key point about DXC is that in many use cases, batch-driven data acquisition at certain intervals is sufficient, for example, every 15 minutes.

Overview of the DXC Rationale

The following key points sum up the rationale for the SAP HANA Direct Extractor Connection:

• Use the preexisting foundation data models of SAP Business Suite entities as a basis for use in SAP HANA data-mart scenarios:
  • Reduces complexity of data modeling tasks in SAP HANA significantly
  • Speeds up time lines for SAP HANA implementation projects
• Provide semantically rich data from SAP Business Suite to SAP HANA
  • Ensures that data appropriately represents the state of business documents from ERP
  • Includes application logic that is built into many extractors
• Simplicity/Low TCO
  • Reuses existing proprietary extraction, transformation, and load mechanism built into SAP Business Suite systems over a simple HTTP(S) connection to SAP HANA
  • Requires no additional server or application in the system landscape
• Change data capture (delta handling):
  • Acquires data efficiently – brings only new or changed data into SAP HANA
  • Handles data from all delta processing types properly

DXC Configuration for SAP Business Suite

There are two configurations available for DXC, based on the SAP Business Suite system:

• The default configuration for SAP Business Suite systems based on SAP NetWeaver 7.0 or higher – such as ECC 6.0 is covered by this document.
• The alternative configuration for SAP Business Suite systems based on releases lower than SAP NetWeaver 7.0 – such as SAP ERP 4.6 is covered in the appendix of this document. For more information, see theAppendix – DXC System Landscape Variants: The “Sidecar” Approach section.

An SAP Business Suite system is based on SAP NetWeaver. As of SAP NetWeaver version 7.0, SAP Business Warehouse (BW) is part of SAP NetWeaver, for example, ERP (ECC 6.0 or higher). This BW system is referred to as an “embedded BW system”. Typically, this embedded BW system is not used because most customers who run BW have it installed on a separate server, and they rely on that one. The default DXC configuration uses the scheduling and monitoring features of the embedded BW system but not its other aspects, such as storing data, data warehousing, or reporting (Business Intelligence (BI)). DXC extraction processing bypasses the normal dataflow and sends data to SAP HANA instead. The following illustration depicts the default configuration of DXC.

In SAP HANA, an In-Memory DataStore Object (IMDSO) is generated, which directly corresponds to the structure of the DataSource you are working with. This IMDSO consists of several tables and an activation mechanism. The active data table of the IMDSO can be used as a basis for building data models in SAP HANA (attribute views, analytical views, and calculation views).

Data is transferred from the SAP Business Suite source system using an HTTP connection. In general terms, the extraction and load process is the same as those used for extracting and loading SAP Business Warehouse – you rely on InfoPackage scheduling, the data load monitor, process chains, and so on.

Note

DXC redirects data into SAP HANA and therefore does not require BW on SAP HANA.