SAP HANA Cloud and SAP Data Warehouse Cloud (SAP DWC) are two complementary pillars of SAP’s cloud data management portfolio. While SAP HANA Cloud provides a high-performance, in-memory database platform, SAP DWC delivers a business-centric, agile data warehousing solution. Integrating these two solutions effectively can unlock powerful data management capabilities, blending advanced analytics, real-time processing, and scalable data warehousing.
This article outlines best practices for integrating SAP Data Warehouse Cloud with SAP HANA Cloud, helping SAP professionals design efficient, scalable, and secure hybrid cloud data architectures.
- High-Performance Data Processing: Leverage SAP HANA Cloud’s in-memory capabilities for fast data processing and complex calculations.
- Scalable Storage: Store large volumes of data in SAP HANA Cloud while using SAP DWC for semantic modeling and analytics.
- Real-Time Data Access: Enable live connections to SAP HANA Cloud from SAP DWC for near real-time data insights.
- Unified Data Landscape: Combine structured and unstructured data across hybrid environments.
- Define remote tables in SAP DWC to access SAP HANA Cloud tables without data duplication.
- Enables real-time querying of operational data.
- Pushes down query processing to SAP HANA Cloud, optimizing performance and reducing data movement.
- Use SAP DWC’s Data Builder to create semantic views on top of SAP HANA Cloud remote tables.
- Implement reusable business logic, calculations, and hierarchies in SAP DWC for consistent reporting.
- Ensure models are designed to push down calculations to SAP HANA Cloud whenever possible.
- For scenarios requiring historical snapshots or complex transformations, schedule ETL jobs to load data from SAP HANA Cloud into SAP DWC.
- Use SAP DWC’s Data Integration capabilities or SAP Data Intelligence for advanced pipelines.
¶ 4. Leverage Security and Authentication Best Practices
- Use secure authentication methods such as OAuth or certificate-based authentication between SAP DWC and SAP HANA Cloud.
- Implement fine-grained data access controls in SAP DWC and SAP HANA Cloud to enforce security policies.
- Ensure network security with VPN or SAP Cloud Connector for private connectivity.
- Use SAP DWC and SAP HANA Cloud monitoring tools to track query performance, job execution times, and resource consumption.
- Optimize remote table usage by avoiding unnecessary joins and selecting only required columns.
- Regularly review execution plans to ensure efficient pushdown of processing to SAP HANA Cloud.
¶ 6. Use Versioning and Change Management
- Manage changes in data models and remote tables with version control and change management processes.
- Test new versions in development or test tenants before production rollout.
- Latency: While live federation offers real-time access, network latency can impact performance; plan accordingly.
- Data Volume: For very large datasets, consider hybrid strategies combining federation and batch loads.
- Backup and Recovery: Implement appropriate backup strategies for data stored in SAP HANA Cloud.
- Scalability: Adjust SAP HANA Cloud sizing based on workload demands.
Integrating SAP Data Warehouse Cloud with SAP HANA Cloud enables enterprises to harness the best of both platforms — high-speed in-memory data processing combined with agile data warehousing and semantic modeling. Following these best practices ensures efficient, secure, and scalable integration, empowering SAP professionals to deliver powerful, real-time analytics solutions.
By designing thoughtful architectures that leverage remote tables, optimize modeling, and enforce strong security, organizations can maximize the value of their SAP cloud investments and drive smarter business outcomes.