Part 2 - SAP S/4HANA Cloud Data Integration Overview

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After getting an overview and understanding of how Virtual Data Models (VDM) and ABAP Core Data Services (ABAP CDS Views) work in SAP S/4HANA, and the requirements needed for a CDS View to be extractable in my colleague michael.sanjongco’s blog post Part 1 - SAP S/4HANA Cloud Data Integration to power your Intelligence Enterprise.

This blog will briefly explain the different components which play a role in exposing data from SAP S/4HANA Cloud, and the different options to connect SAP S/4HANA to target systems like SAP BW/4HANA, SAP Data Intelligence, and SAP Data Warehouse Cloud to be able to extract data to them, and achieve your extensibility and analytics scenarios.

Figure1: SAP S/4HANA Data Integration - Architectural Overview

Explaining the extraction mechanism from a bottom-up approach as shown in the Architectural Overview (figure 1):

• Application Tables are the database tables that hold all business/configuration data. Data cannot be extracted directly from them


• Internal CDS View Models are views built on top of Application Tables and/or other CDS Views for data modeling purposes


• CDS Extraction views are the extraction-enabled CDS Views that are built on top of associations of Application Tables and/or other CDS Views, depending on what the CDS View itself is exposing. They are used for data extraction from SAP S/4HANA


• Extraction runtime is the middleware between the CDS Views and target systems. It contains different engines like Operational Data Provisioning (ODP)/Operational Delta Queue (ODQ), Change Data Capture (CDC), and Reconstruction. They are responsible to convert, expose and transfer the data to the respective API which the target system can communicate with; those are reflected both in the communication scenarios configured in SAP S/4HANA Cloud, and the respective connection type/configuration on the target system as it will be explained in detail in the next blogs

The table below shows the different integration scenarios, their corresponding communication scenario(s), connection types, best practices to guide you on how to set up the integration scenario, and documentation of different applications that can be used in target systems to extract SAP S/4HANA Cloud Data from:

Scenario	Target System	Communication Scenario	API	Protocol	Scope Item	Connection Types	Documentation
1	SAP BW/4HANA	SAP_COM_0042	SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol)	Remote Function Call (RFC)	35D		Transferring Data from SAP Systems  via ODP (ABAP CDS Views)
	SAP Business Warehouse powered by SAP HANA
2	SAP Data Intelligence	SAP_COM_0532	ABAP Pipeline	Websocket RFC	53M	ABAP Connection	ABAP CDS Reader Operator
		SAP_COM_0531	Cloud Data Integration (CDI)	oData		Cloud Data Integration	Cloud Data Integration Consumer
3	SAP Data Warehouse Cloud	SAP_COM_0532	ABAP Pipeline	Websocket RFC	53L	S/4HANA Cloud (Recommended)	· Replicating Data and Monitoring Remote Tables requires Data Provisioning Agent (DP Agent) · Extraction through data flows
		SAP_COM_0532	ABAP Pipeline	Websocket RFC		SAP ABAP connection (Supports Data Flows only)
		SAP_COM_0531	CDI	oData		Cloud Data Integration

You can use Data Flows and Remote Tables in SAP Data Warehouse Cloud to preview the data exposed by the ABAP CDS Views before extracting them. As for SAP Data Intelligence, you can use the Metadata Explorer to have a metadata analysis for the ABAP CDS Views (e.g. ABAP CDS Views fields and field types).

In the next blogs, we will discuss in detail each of the S/4HANA Cloud Integration scenarios, how you can set them up and make the best use of them.

We would be happy to receive your feedback in the blog post comments section below and answer all your questions under the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Q&A area.

See you in our next blog posts.