We are thrilled to announce the upcoming General Availability (GA) of live data integration from Google BigQuery (GBQ) into SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC). This significant milestone empowers our customers to leverage their actuals data directly from GBQ data lakes, while seamlessly incorporating it into SAC as if the data were locally replicated. This enhancement introduces data federation capabilities to SAC data models, allowing usage of GBQ data within SAC data models as if it were local, enabling enhanced analytics and decision-making.
With this new integration, our customers who use GBQ as their data lake can now leave their actuals data in GBQ, keeping their data where it naturally resides, reducing the need for additional data replication and storage management. This is especially useful for customers who have XP&A scenarios and for business users who want to use federated data, without the assistant of a data engineer.
Expanded Data Access
You don’t use GBQ? Perhaps you use something like Impala, Oracle, Snowflake or Azure data lakes instead. GBQ is just the first step. We are committed to expanding these federation capabilities to support even more data sources and are currently working on covering all of the most popular data sources in the near future.
Technical Notice
As we roll out this new feature, there are a few important technical considerations to keep in mind:
HANA Cloud Requirement
- Your SAC tenant must be running on HANA Cloud, not HANA 2. Some customer tenants already have this configuration, but mass migration has not yet occurred. We will provide additional guidance on migration as needed. You can check the status of your tenant by looking in the about dialog. If it is a HANA Cloud based tenant, it will display the HANA Cloud version in this dialog. This information will not be present on HANA 2 tenants. More information on the migration is available here.
Architectural Work
- To facilitate the rapid expansion of our federated data source list, we will be conducting some architectural work on our federation infrastructure. While we do not anticipate any significant issues, there is a low probability that existing federated models created during the first quarter after the initial GA release may be impacted.
Note
If you create a data model with federated data access to GBQ sources prior to QRC 2025 Q3, please be aware of this potential. By QRC3, we expect to mitigate all risks associated with these architectural changes.
Feature Activation
Given the potential for minor disruptions, this feature will not be enabled by default. Until QRC3 2025 Q3, customers will need to raise a support ticket to have their HANA Cloud-based tenant enabled for federated access to GBQ. Please note that this measure is not to block anyone from using this feature. If you have a tenant that can support this feature, you can get it enabled. We simply want to make sure that you are aware that we can’t rule out breaking any models created during the first quarter after release. Please contact our support team for assistance.
Embrace the Future of Data Integration
We are excited about this step forward in data integration and look forward to bringing even more capabilities to our customers. Stay tuned for more updates and enhancements as we continue to improve SAP Analytics Cloud.
