Accessing S/4 HANA Cloud (S4HC) via Smart Data Integration (SDI)

[former_member133918]

Dear Community,

is it possible to access the HANA DB behind my subscription of S4HC via SDI?

If yes, where could I find more information how to get it?

If not, wouldn't this be the true enabled to leverage the power of HANA?
(Imagine S4HC Extensions running on the Cloud Foundry being able to execute complex SQL queries on its own HANA DB by selecting from virtual tables pointing to the true S4HC core table or view)

Regards,
Julian

[MJolton]

Have you seen this blog: https://blogs.sap.com/2018/12/12/how-to-integrate-and-consume-your-s4hana-cloud-data-on-premise-usin...

It provides how to use CDS views in S/4HANA Cloud and SDI to get data into Enterprise HANA.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi julian.c.mayer_camelot-itlab : If you are talking about S/4HANA Cloud (public), then please note that this is a Software as a Service (SaaS) offering where the infrastructure, core code-line development and ABAP + Database + Infrastructural Developments are completely managed by SAP. Also this is one of the architectural principles of any public cloud solutions. Hence there is no way in S/4HANA Cloud (public) to expose a SQL workbench to run complex queries directly at the Database level. SAP S/4HANA Cloud however provides a similar ways to fulfill this requirement using the extensibility framework - using customer CDS views, custom queries and so on. Also using side by side extensibility, you can use the CDS views to be exposed as APIs on the SAP BTP and use it for your own custom developments as required using ABAP development tools or even using the HANA Database as a service on the SAP BTP.

Find more information here - https://help.sap.com/viewer/0f69f8fb28ac4bf48d2b57b9637e81fa/latest/en-US/8573b810511948c8a99c0672ab...

Thanks,

Saumi

[former_member133918 · Accepted solution]

Hi Saumi,

thank you for the reply. What you describe is what we know and do today.

But as you are probable aware the custom CDS views are by far not flexible enough to do what needs to be done.
Also they are not really leveraging the power of HANA as they have very bad performance on runtime and cannot really handle mass data well. All of this would be an easy thing with SDI, but I understand: SAP doesn't want it.

Thanks,
Julian

[DanielEndres]

I know this article is stale for a while but just following up if in the meantime maybe something changed. SDI for S4HC would make certain scenarios a lot easier.

Best regards

Daniel

[OwenLiu]

Hi Julian,

I never heard about direct DB access for S4HC.
I think that will be risky.

Best Regards,
Owen

[former_member133918]

Hi Owen,

thank you for your reply.

Why should it be risky? It would be a read-only access for sure, but it would enable CDS Views like it's possible on S/4 HANA on-prem but in the cloud. Architecture wise is this no issue at all and has been done already many times in the on-prem world with other side-by-side scenarios.

Regards,
Julian

[OwenLiu]

I just would say it's not possible currently. If it is, there will be no needs at all to build up APIs to fetch data from S4HC.

[former_member772175]

Well, API is definately needed to push data properly. But reading data would be much better from DB especially when the DB is a HANA. We are not really using the power of HANA when wrapping it behind bottle-necked APIs