In today's data-driven business landscape, real-time access to transactional and analytical data is a competitive necessity. Traditional reporting mechanisms often lag in delivering timely insights, especially in fast-paced enterprise environments. This is where SAP HANA Live, powered by Core Data Services (CDS) views, becomes a game changer. CDS views are a central component in SAP’s data modeling strategy for HANA-based applications, enabling advanced, real-time reporting and analytics directly on live transactional data.
Core Data Services (CDS) are a modern data modeling infrastructure introduced by SAP to define semantically rich data models at the database level. Unlike legacy ABAP-based data models, CDS views leverage HANA’s in-memory computing capabilities, allowing for high-performance, real-time access to data. CDS views can be created and consumed in the ABAP layer or directly on the HANA database layer, and they serve as the foundational building blocks in SAP HANA Live.
CDS views allow users to access transactional data as it is being generated, eliminating the latency introduced by batch data extraction and replication. This enables businesses to make data-driven decisions based on the most current information.
Example: A finance team can analyze daily cash flow or outstanding payments without waiting for end-of-day data loads.
CDS views promote a semantic-layer approach, where data definitions and business logic are defined once and reused across applications and reports. This reduces redundancy and simplifies the data landscape.
Benefit: Developers and analysts work with consistent data definitions, improving maintainability and reducing errors.
Built to run natively on SAP HANA, CDS views leverage features like push-down processing, parallel execution, and columnar storage to deliver high-speed performance—even with large data volumes.
Real-World Impact: Complex reports that once took minutes or hours to run can now be generated in seconds.
CDS views can be layered, allowing developers to build modular and reusable data models. For example, a basic view for sales data can be reused in multiple composite views for different reporting scenarios.
Advantage: Speeds up development time and enforces consistency across business reports.
CDS views can incorporate SAP’s authorization concepts directly through annotation-based role and access control mechanisms. This ensures that sensitive data is protected without requiring additional security layers in reporting tools.
Example: A sales manager only sees data relevant to their region, enforced at the data layer.
CDS views support annotations that can define metadata such as labels, currency formats, units of measure, and analytical capabilities. These annotations enhance the end-user experience in tools like SAP Fiori and SAP Analytics Cloud.
Outcome: End-users get intuitive and self-service reporting interfaces with minimal additional development effort.
CDS views serve as the backbone for SAP Fiori apps and embedded analytics in S/4HANA. They allow users to drill down, filter, and interact with reports directly within transactional applications, merging operations and analytics in one environment.
Strategic Value: Reduces reliance on external BI tools and fosters real-time operational insights.
CDS views are a cornerstone technology in the SAP HANA Live framework, enabling real-time, scalable, and secure access to business data. Their combination of semantic richness, performance, and integration capabilities makes them essential for any organization seeking to modernize its reporting architecture. By leveraging CDS views, businesses can unlock the full power of SAP HANA and transform their decision-making processes with real-time intelligence.
As enterprises continue to evolve toward real-time analytics and intelligent automation, CDS views will remain a foundational element in the journey toward becoming an intelligent enterprise.