We always strive to bring the best of emerging technologies and solutions to our clients. Salt Analytics Consultant Andrea Goble, has been working on a client project to implement the new SAP Datasphere, and shares some of her insights with us.
Andrea, what is SAP Datasphere?
It’s brand new – only Introduced in March 2023. Building on the latest cloud-based data warehouse offering from SAP, it allows organisations to implement a data fabric architecture. Essentially this means that data across the organisation can be combined and exposed for analytical purposes without having to move it into one central data warehouse.
And what problem are you solving for your client, using SAP Datasphere?
Our client wanted to upgrade their analytics platform to be future-fit and fully cloud-based. They also wanted to seamlessly integrate data from multiple sources, including real time insights from S4/HANA, into a powerful and visual self-service offering – Datasphere with SAC solves all of this.
What are some of your favourite features of Datasphere?
- Real time data replication is definitely a standout feature for me. This allows you to effectively access data from S4/HANA in near real-time.
- Integration with SAC for analytics and planning is also great.
- Finally, of course, connectivity to a variety of on-prem and cloud-hosted, SAP and non-SAP data sources.
What are some of the limitations you’ve had to overcome – and what workarounds did you employ?
While remote or federated integration is a useful feature, we’ve found that, for larger data sets, it is better to use real time replication.
From a developer’s perspective, the view visualisation tool is also somewhat limited. Fortunately, there are workarounds, such as using SQL views to set record limits, or leveraging the Excel add-on to analyse the data source. There have been several improvements to the viewer already – such as the ability to adjust filters, columns and sorting in a single step, enhanced filtering options, and the capability to view entire datasets in the viewer. Given the pace of recent updates, I am confident that further enhancements will be made soon.
“With SAP Datasphere, data across the organisation can be combined and exposed for analytical purposes without having to move it into one central data warehouse.”
Anything you are looking forward to in the latest feature release?
SAP really have their full focus on this product – offering new and very useful updates and feature releases frequently. The latest release was actually yesterday, including four data integration and two data modelling enhancements. I am looking forward to testing these new updates and understanding how we can use them on our client’s solution.
Any good resources you can recommend to consultants starting out on their first Datasphere implementation?
I would recommend they start with the training courses in the SAP Learning Hub. Doing Learning Hub courses means that you are always up-to-date and, better still, they’re free! You can even spin up a trial version of Datasphere and SAC to play around with or, if you’re more serious about it, you can purchase the SAP Certification. The SAP Data Engineer – Data Fabric certification has actually just been released and five of our Salt Analytics team members are working on certifying. This certification covers the technical skills needed for modelling in BW4/HANA and Datasphere.
Datasphere also offers great Business Content for specific industries and lines of business, including pre-built models for SAP sources or non-SAP sources (in the Partner content area) and other useful templates. Each business content package includes a detailed description of its components, KPIs, data sources and so forth, as well as all relevant documentation on how to setup. I definitely find it really useful.
Thanks Andrea, for your stellar work – and the insights.
