The SAP BW/4HANA system can be used as a data consolidation platform. Within the Data Warehouse, we can consume data from various source systems and provide a common semantic layer. How to Replicate Data from Azure to SAP?
Let’s consider an architecture where the SAP BW/4HANA system consolidates data from regional ERP and other systems, and one of them stores data on Azure BLOB. This may refer, for example, to Sales data being maintained regionally.
In such a scenario, we want to bring the Azure data into SAP BW/4HANA, to consolidate all the data in one place. In this example, the Azure Data Factory moves the data to the SAP-BW/4HANA system.
Azure pushes the content of the CSV file (ADLS gen.2 storage) to BW/4HANA, for data replication.
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The Azure Data Factory allows us to connect with the SAP-HANA database via Integration Runtime and to send the data. Once the SAP and Azure data is merged, we can build a common view of the global data.
The entire dataflow looks like this:
Once the Azure Data Factory pushes the data to the SAP HANA table, it is automatically available in the reporting layer. The transfer of 4 million records from Azure to SAP BW/4HANA took 2 minutes.
Having the Composite Provider joining data from both sources, enabled the creation of a report that shows the Sales data from across all regions. The BEX Query data can be visualized in the SAP Analytics Cloud dashboard and provides actionable insights.
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From Azure to SAP systems
In this scenario we were able to verify the integration option of the Azure data into the Systems Applications and Products systems. It has been tested and confirmed that extraction of Azure data and combining it with the data from the ERP system within the SAP BW/4HANA is possible in a reasonable time.
This solution is recommended for consolidation scenarios, where the Azure system is responsible for pushing data to the Data Warehouse. Once the data coming from Azure is populated in the SAP HANA system via the generic ODBC connector, the SAP BW/4HANA system can easily consume and expose it in the common layer for presentation, for example in the SAP Analytics Cloud.
