Subject: SAP-Data-Management-Suite | Category: SAP Field
In today’s data-rich enterprise environments, organizations face the challenge of accessing and integrating data spread across multiple, heterogeneous sources — including on-premises databases, cloud data lakes, and third-party applications. Traditional data integration approaches involving data replication can be costly and time-consuming. To address this, data federation and virtualization techniques offer a more agile and efficient approach to data integration.
SAP Data Hub (now part of SAP Data Intelligence) provides powerful data federation and virtualization capabilities that enable seamless, real-time access to distributed data without physically moving it. This article explores how SAP Data Hub implements data federation and virtualization to empower enterprise data management and analytics.
Together, these techniques reduce data duplication, speed up access, and simplify data governance by enabling real-time access to diverse data assets.
SAP Data Hub builds a centralized metadata catalog aggregating technical and business metadata from multiple sources. This unified metadata layer enables:
Using SAP Data Hub, data engineers can create virtual datasets that join, transform, and enrich data across heterogeneous systems without physical replication.
SAP Data Hub includes a wide array of connectors to diverse data sources:
These connectors enable seamless access to data for virtualization.
A global retailer leveraged SAP Data Hub’s federation capabilities to unify customer data from regional ERP systems, cloud marketing platforms, and on-premises warehouses. By creating virtual data models, they enabled real-time customer 360° views for their analytics teams without the delays and costs of data replication. This approach improved customer insights and accelerated campaign responsiveness.
Data federation and virtualization in SAP Data Hub empower enterprises to overcome the complexities of hybrid and distributed data landscapes. By providing unified, real-time data access without the need for physical consolidation, SAP Data Hub enables more agile, cost-effective, and governed data management strategies. Organizations embracing these techniques can accelerate analytics, enhance collaboration, and drive smarter business outcomes.