In the evolving landscape of enterprise data solutions, SAP HANA Live and Core Data Services (CDS) have emerged as cornerstone technologies for real-time reporting and analytics. CDS-based solutions are foundational to the SAP HANA Live architecture, offering semantic richness, reusability, and performance efficiency. This article explores the architecture of CDS-based solutions within the context of SAP HANA Live, highlighting their design principles, layers, and practical benefits for modern SAP systems.
SAP HANA Live is a collection of pre-developed calculation views and analytical models that run directly on the SAP HANA database. It enables real-time operational reporting without needing to extract and replicate data to a separate reporting system. HANA Live leverages the in-memory computing capabilities of SAP HANA to deliver instantaneous insights on transactional data.
Core Data Services (CDS) is a semantic data modeling infrastructure used to define and consume data models on the SAP HANA platform and within the ABAP environment. CDS views abstract the data access layer and provide reusable definitions that can be used in analytics, services, and transactions.
In SAP HANA Live, CDS views form the backbone of the modeling architecture, replacing earlier SQL-based or calculation view-based modeling with a more semantic, metadata-rich approach.
The architecture of CDS-based solutions in SAP HANA Live typically consists of three major layers:
Example: I_SalesOrder might map closely to the VBAK table in SAP.
Example: C_SalesOrderItem combines sales order headers and items with additional attributes such as customer name or material description.
Example: Z_SalesOrderReport provides a ready-to-use dataset for a sales dashboard.
@Analytics.query) to enhance reporting capabilities.Understanding the architecture of CDS-based solutions in SAP HANA Live is essential for building efficient, scalable, and semantically rich data models. The layered approach—starting from raw data interface views up to richly annotated consumption views—enables enterprises to deliver real-time insights while maintaining flexibility and governance. As SAP continues to evolve toward S/4HANA, CDS will remain a critical technology for both operational and analytical applications.