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This blog gives you an overview about new features and enhancements with SAP Data Warehouse Cloud during Q3 2021. This includes the features covered in the What’s New webinar, as well as smaller features and enhancement in order to give you a broader overview in one place.
On October 13th, 2021 we will hold our quarterly update session to show you the great features we have delivered to SAP Data Warehouse Cloud during the third quarter of 2021.
The session on starts at 5 pm CEST and covers the following topics
Join us for the session live or watch the recording afterwards.
The SAP Business Technology Platform including SAP Data Warehouse Cloud has successfully passed the following audits:
The documents are published and generally available on the SAP Trust Center.
For more information, see Compliance Standards.
We have just added another First Guidance document for SAP Data Warehouse Cloud covering Development Guidelines and Naming Conventions.
The guide is available on our best practice and troubleshooting page, where you also find more first guidance documents, recommendations, how-to guides, and other valuable information for customers and partners when using SAP Data Warehouse Cloud.
From the shell bar, you can now use the in-app Help to directly open a help panel providing help specific to the context of the UI you are working in. Links to further resources such as the SAP Community are available from the help panel of the Home screen. With a new button Support you can open a dialog with support-related activities. The option to send feedback is now available on the Home screen.
For more information, see Navigating in SAP Data Warehouse Cloud.
The SAP Data Warehouse Cloud Trial allows you to evaluate how SAP Data Warehouse Cloud can help you solve your business challenges. The 128 GB (128 GB storage and 64 GB memory) Trial is available online. The trial period is 30 days. This can be extended up to 90 days through frequent usage of your trial.
SAP Data Warehouse Cloud is now also available in data centers in Canada and South Korea. The AWS data centers CA10 in Montreal and AP12 in Seoul have been added as additional choices.
In addition, the first data center from Microsoft Azure in the US can now host your tenants in the US20 data center.
Tables in data flows can now be switched from target to source and the other way around at any time. It is no longer necessary to delete tables from a data flow to change the source/target setting.
For more information, see Creating a Data Flow.
New UPSERT mode available in data flows to overwrite existing primary key records and append new records based on the primary key combination. So far it was only possible to load either the entire table new in truncate mode or only new records in append mode. It was not possible to update a partial table, this is now possible.
For more information, see Target Properties.
You can now grant write access to tables located in Open SQL schemas, SAP HANA Deployment Infrastructure (HDI) containers, and SQL User Group schema, and use them as source or targets in a data flow. Until now only reading from HDI container was possible. Now we gain the capability to write into them.
For more information, see Granting Write Access to Tables, HDI Container, Creating a Data Flow, and Granting Access to Tables.
This new smaller feature allows to Jump from Integration Monitor into the Data Builder and vice versa. This makes navigating between the screens a lot easier during development.
With the new connection type you can extend connectivity beyond SAP Data Warehouse Cloud standard connectivity and cover additional data sources that are available with Precog as a partner solution. For more information, see Precog.
When you create a connection, the space name is no longer included as a prefix to the connection name. Existing connection keep the concatenated names.
The dialog box for scheduling data integration tasks has been redesigned and includes these features:
In the Remote table Monitor - details screen, you can now easily resume real-time replication for remote tables whose status has turned into failed. After you have corrected the error, simply click the Retry button and your real-time replication will be resumed.
For more information, see Working in the Data Integration Monitors - Details Screen.
Allow partition on non-numeric data types to have maximum flexibility when choosing the partitioning column for ODP / ABAP sources so that you can achieve optimal distribution of data for partitioned remote table replications.
You can now make SAP HANA monitoring views available in a dedicated space in SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, so that users assigned to the space can monitor resource consumption. In addition, the tracing of expensive statements executed in the tenant is enabled. You can configure the parameters for tracing expensive statements:
For more information, see Setting up a Monitoring Space in SAP Data Warehouse Cloud.
In the Remote table Monitor - details screen, you can now create statistics for your remote tables to ensure the best possible query performance of views with federated data access and provide efficient query execution plans.
For more information, see Creating Statistics for Your Remote Tables.
Up to now the Used Disk bar at the top of the Space Management page only showed the storage consumed by data related to spaces. The bar now also shows the consumption of data that is not related to spaces using tooltips (for example, data consumed by audit logs or data in schemas created by a database user group).
For more information, see Working with Spaces.
You can now enable a new view for auditing via the audit space, which lists the audit policies and the number of audit log entries: AUDIT_LOG_OVERVIEW in the schema DWC_AUDIT_READER.
For more information, see Audit Logging.
With the option Enable Space Quota you can now decide to define space quotas or not. This allows you to quickly create a space without thinking of space quota and storage size allocation, for example when starting with SAP Data Warehouse Cloud and you don't know yet about the required storage size when creating the first space. When disabled, there's no space quota check, the space won't be locked, and it can consume as much storage as needed. You can change the setting later for existing spaces when you know how much storage is needed by the space and how it should be allocated.
For more information, see Creating your Space.
In addition to the already existing priority parameter, you can now use two additional parameters to configure workload classes for a space: Total Statement Thread Limit, to avoid excessive concurrent processing due to too many jobs; Total Statement Memory limit, to prevent statement execution from consuming too much memory. The three parameters are grouped together in a new area in a space, called Workload Class.
For more information, see Configuring Workload Classes.
The ID of a space is now displayed in these two areas of the Space Management page: below the space name in the tiles and in a new column called Space ID in the table layout.
For more information about spaces in general, see Working with Spaces.
Now, when you save a space, it is not automatically deployed to the database. Like with data modeling artifacts you can choose to deploy the space when you are ready.
For more information, see Saving and Deploying your Space.
You can use the new SAP Data Warehouse Cloud command line interface, dwc, to create, read, update, and delete spaces, including setting space properties, assigning members, creating database users, and associating HDI containers to your space.
For more information, see Create, Read, Update, and Delete Spaces via the Command Line in the SAP documentation. You can also find more information these two blogs from Jascha Kanngiesser:
In the Data Integration Monitor, resources consuming tasks such as data loading, persisting of a view, scheduling of tasks, can be performed by different types of user profiles. Thus, a new privilege DWC_DATAINTEGRATION has been created to allow for a more targeted permission concept for direct execution and scheduling aspects of the Data Integration Monitor.
Note: The introduction of this privilege requires a manual adaptation of existing custom roles. All standard roles delivered by default in SAP Data Warehouse Cloud have already been updated and contain the new privilege object.
To maintain the same level of authorizations for your users, you need to additionally:
Also note that this addition to your custom roles will not grant additional authorizations to your users. Any user who has currently the permission Update of the existing privilege DWC_REMOTECONNECTION has the same level of authorization covered by the permissions Update and Execute with the new privilege DWC_DATAINTEGRATION.
For more information, see Privilege Types.
It is now allowed to persist views that have data access controls, which gives you more flexibility when persisting views in the data model.
You can now import analysis authorizations defined in SAP BW∕4HANA 2.0 and higher systems into SAP Data Warehouse Cloud to provide row-level protection for data in remote tables imported from these systems. The Import Permissions wizard allows you to select tables to protect and will, for each selected table, create a view to calculate its permissions, a data access control to consume them, and a second protected view to wrap the remote table and apply the data access control.
For more information, see Importing SAP BW∕4HANA Analysis Authorizations.
For perspectives, you can now enable the option Run in Analytics Mode in order to optimize performance. The same option is available in the Data Builder. This sends the USE_OLAP_PLAN hint to the SQL optimizer.
For more information, see Define Perspectives.
The new Semantic Usage property Hierarchy allows you to create an external parent-child hierarchy in a view for situations where your hierarchy information is stored outside your dimension. You can add an external hierarchy to your dimension from the Hierarchies dialog or via a Hierarchy Association in the Associations list.
For more information, see Create an External Hierarchy.
Separation between Design Time and Run Time state enables more flexible handling user interactions, e.g. Model Deployment, Data Preview, Wrangling, CSV File Upload, etc.
Following states are exposed:
You can visualize the path of a column in a graphical view by highlighting its lineage back to their sources to better understand where a graphical view's columns come from.
For more information, see Visualizing the Lineage of Columns in a Graphical View.
Update your remote data sources and resolve conflicting errors resulting from these updates. When a remote source table connected over an SDI adapter has been modified, it's now possible to update its structure from the Data Builder: SAP Data Warehouse Cloud allows you to check for changes and you are notified how they impact your table structure and dependent objects.
For more information, see Updating Remote Table Structure.
To improve the usability and efficiency in modeling you can now rename Join, Union, Projection, Filter, and Aggregation nodes in their side panel to clearly identify them especially in large data models.
For more information, see Creating a Graphical View.
When you enable Expose for Consumption for an analytical dataset, SAP Analytics Cloud will now be able to access any dimensions and other entities to which it points via associations, even if these associated entities have not themselves been exposed.
For more information, see Creating an SQL View and Creating a Graphical View.
In addition to a number of small cosmetic changes, the Repository Explorer now displays a filter bar listing the criteria on which you are currently filtering the list of objects.
For more information, see Repository Explorer.
When invalid values are added to or duplicated in a table, a red or yellow frame appears to let you know where changes are required. Validation messages give you guidance on how to solve the issue. In addition, a standard date picker control for fields of type Date/Time has been added for easier data maintenance without losing the manual modification allowed using copy & paste.
For more information, see Maintaining Table Data.
Create and apply advanced filters in a local table's Data Preview with the Define Filters dialog.
For more information, see Previewing Data and Maintaining Table Data.
The content for SAP Analytics Cloud and Data Warehouse Cloud on Outcome-Based Business Insights helps customers transition their profitably to higher-margin solutions and outcome-based models by offering profitability monitoring and visibility of KPIs/SLAs along the life-cycle of the contract. This content is based on the upcoming the SAP Outcome-Based Business Insights (OBBI) application, which is targeted for Q4 2021
The SAP Sample Content for Finance, Human Resources and Sales uses the Best Run Bikes sample data package to help you explore and learn your way around in SAP Data Warehouse Cloud. It is a great way as a first and fast starting point into data modelling in SAP Data Warehouse Cloud. The sample content supports the onboarding of new users through demonstrating product features by following a clear structure and answering a business question. This content package will be continuously updated, so make sure to check for the newest version.
The Step-by-Step guide in the overview blog post explains how to import and setup the content.
Find a detailed description of each individual LoB in the following blog post:
Find further information to get started with SAP Data Warehouse Cloud and check out the Best Practices on the Community for SAP Data Warehouse Cloud
Learn about the upcoming events and webinars for SAP Data Warehouse Cloud.
What’s New in Q3-2021 Webinar
On October 13th, 2021 we will hold our quarterly update session to show you the great features we have delivered to SAP Data Warehouse Cloud during the third quarter of 2021.
The session on starts at 5 pm CEST and covers the following topics
- General product updates
- New data centers & data flow enhancements
- External hierarchies and other updates in the modeling
- Data Maintenance & Space Management enhancements
- New monitoring capabilities
Join us for the session live or watch the recording afterwards.
Content of this blog post
- General Information
- Data Management & Integration
- Monitoring
- Space Management
- Security & Governance
- Data Modeling
- Business Content
- More Information
General Information
New Certifications
The SAP Business Technology Platform including SAP Data Warehouse Cloud has successfully passed the following audits:
- ISO 27001 / 27017/ 27018
- ISO22301
- SOC1 Type 2
- SOC2 Type 2
- CSA STAR registry / CSA STAR Certificate
- EU Cloud CoC
The documents are published and generally available on the SAP Trust Center.
For more information, see Compliance Standards.
New First Guidance Document
We have just added another First Guidance document for SAP Data Warehouse Cloud covering Development Guidelines and Naming Conventions.
The guide is available on our best practice and troubleshooting page, where you also find more first guidance documents, recommendations, how-to guides, and other valuable information for customers and partners when using SAP Data Warehouse Cloud.
Rearranged Help, Support Features, and Resources
From the shell bar, you can now use the in-app Help to directly open a help panel providing help specific to the context of the UI you are working in. Links to further resources such as the SAP Community are available from the help panel of the Home screen. With a new button Support you can open a dialog with support-related activities. The option to send feedback is now available on the Home screen.
For more information, see Navigating in SAP Data Warehouse Cloud.
Trial Tenants available up to 90 days
The SAP Data Warehouse Cloud Trial allows you to evaluate how SAP Data Warehouse Cloud can help you solve your business challenges. The 128 GB (128 GB storage and 64 GB memory) Trial is available online. The trial period is 30 days. This can be extended up to 90 days through frequent usage of your trial.
New Data Centers available
SAP Data Warehouse Cloud is now also available in data centers in Canada and South Korea. The AWS data centers CA10 in Montreal and AP12 in Seoul have been added as additional choices.
In addition, the first data center from Microsoft Azure in the US can now host your tenants in the US20 data center.
Data Management & Integration
Data Flow: switch source & target tables at any time
Tables in data flows can now be switched from target to source and the other way around at any time. It is no longer necessary to delete tables from a data flow to change the source/target setting.
For more information, see Creating a Data Flow.
Check out how it works
Data Flow: Upsert Mode for Targets
New UPSERT mode available in data flows to overwrite existing primary key records and append new records based on the primary key combination. So far it was only possible to load either the entire table new in truncate mode or only new records in append mode. It was not possible to update a partial table, this is now possible.
For more information, see Target Properties.
Check out how it works
Data Flow: support tables in HDI containers and SQL Schemas as targets
You can now grant write access to tables located in Open SQL schemas, SAP HANA Deployment Infrastructure (HDI) containers, and SQL User Group schema, and use them as source or targets in a data flow. Until now only reading from HDI container was possible. Now we gain the capability to write into them.
For more information, see Granting Write Access to Tables, HDI Container, Creating a Data Flow, and Granting Access to Tables.
View, Table and Data Flow Links in Monitors
This new smaller feature allows to Jump from Integration Monitor into the Data Builder and vice versa. This makes navigating between the screens a lot easier during development.
Check out how it works
Partner Connection for Precog
With the new connection type you can extend connectivity beyond SAP Data Warehouse Cloud standard connectivity and cover additional data sources that are available with Precog as a partner solution. For more information, see Precog.
Check out how it works
Space local name for connections
When you create a connection, the space name is no longer included as a prefix to the connection name. Existing connection keep the concatenated names.
Check out how it works
Scheduling Dialog improvements - Custom Cronstring to better offset for hourly schedules
The dialog box for scheduling data integration tasks has been redesigned and includes these features:
- Schedule Data Integration Tasks by Entering Cron Expression
You can now create a schedule by entering directly a cron expression in the scheduling dialog box, so that your tasks run multiple times a day or run on specific days and months. For more information, see Schedule a Data Integration Task (with Cron Expression).
- Specify an Offset for Hourly Schedules
When you define a simple schedule to run tasks hourly, you can now specify an offset of more than one hour. For example, a task will run every 2 hours starting from 1:30 AM (offset). For more information, see Schedule a Data Integration Task.
Check out how it works
Remote Table Monitor: Retry Remote Subscriptions
In the Remote table Monitor - details screen, you can now easily resume real-time replication for remote tables whose status has turned into failed. After you have corrected the error, simply click the Retry button and your real-time replication will be resumed.
For more information, see Working in the Data Integration Monitors - Details Screen.
Check out how it works
Remote Table Replication: Partitioned Data Transfer - additional data type support for ABAP/ODP
Allow partition on non-numeric data types to have maximum flexibility when choosing the partitioning column for ODP / ABAP sources so that you can achieve optimal distribution of data for partitioned remote table replications.
Check out how it works
Monitoring
Resource Monitoring Views & Activate expensive Statements Trace
You can now make SAP HANA monitoring views available in a dedicated space in SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, so that users assigned to the space can monitor resource consumption. In addition, the tracing of expensive statements executed in the tenant is enabled. You can configure the parameters for tracing expensive statements:
- CPU Time
- Memory
- Duration
For more information, see Setting up a Monitoring Space in SAP Data Warehouse Cloud.
Check out how it works
Data Statistics on Virtual Tables for SQL Optimizer
In the Remote table Monitor - details screen, you can now create statistics for your remote tables to ensure the best possible query performance of views with federated data access and provide efficient query execution plans.
For more information, see Creating Statistics for Your Remote Tables.
Enhance Audit Log Monitoring
Up to now the Used Disk bar at the top of the Space Management page only showed the storage consumed by data related to spaces. The bar now also shows the consumption of data that is not related to spaces using tooltips (for example, data consumed by audit logs or data in schemas created by a database user group).
For more information, see Working with Spaces.
You can now enable a new view for auditing via the audit space, which lists the audit policies and the number of audit log entries: AUDIT_LOG_OVERVIEW in the schema DWC_AUDIT_READER.
For more information, see Audit Logging.
Check out how it works
Space Management
Space Quota Assignment Becomes Optional
With the option Enable Space Quota you can now decide to define space quotas or not. This allows you to quickly create a space without thinking of space quota and storage size allocation, for example when starting with SAP Data Warehouse Cloud and you don't know yet about the required storage size when creating the first space. When disabled, there's no space quota check, the space won't be locked, and it can consume as much storage as needed. You can change the setting later for existing spaces when you know how much storage is needed by the space and how it should be allocated.
For more information, see Creating your Space.
Check out how it works
Enhance workload class configuration in Spaces
In addition to the already existing priority parameter, you can now use two additional parameters to configure workload classes for a space: Total Statement Thread Limit, to avoid excessive concurrent processing due to too many jobs; Total Statement Memory limit, to prevent statement execution from consuming too much memory. The three parameters are grouped together in a new area in a space, called Workload Class.
For more information, see Configuring Workload Classes.
Check out how it works
Show technical name in Space tiles
The ID of a space is now displayed in these two areas of the Space Management page: below the space name in the tiles and in a new column called Space ID in the table layout.
For more information about spaces in general, see Working with Spaces.
Check out how it works
Runtime / Design-time Separation
Now, when you save a space, it is not automatically deployed to the database. Like with data modeling artifacts you can choose to deploy the space when you are ready.
For more information, see Saving and Deploying your Space.
Space Management API & Command Line Interface
You can use the new SAP Data Warehouse Cloud command line interface, dwc, to create, read, update, and delete spaces, including setting space properties, assigning members, creating database users, and associating HDI containers to your space.
For more information, see Create, Read, Update, and Delete Spaces via the Command Line in the SAP documentation. You can also find more information these two blogs from Jascha Kanngiesser:
- New Command-Line Interface for SAP Data Warehouse Cloud – code your way to the cloud!
- Automatically Add Members to Spaces in SAP Data Warehouse Cloud Using @sap/dwc-cli
Security & Governance
Additional Privilege for Direct Execution & Scheduling
In the Data Integration Monitor, resources consuming tasks such as data loading, persisting of a view, scheduling of tasks, can be performed by different types of user profiles. Thus, a new privilege DWC_DATAINTEGRATION has been created to allow for a more targeted permission concept for direct execution and scheduling aspects of the Data Integration Monitor.
Note: The introduction of this privilege requires a manual adaptation of existing custom roles. All standard roles delivered by default in SAP Data Warehouse Cloud have already been updated and contain the new privilege object.
To maintain the same level of authorizations for your users, you need to additionally:
- Set the Read permission to the newly introduced privilege DWC_DATAINTEGRATION where you had set so far DWC_REMOTECONNECTION with Read permission.
- Set the Update and Execute permissions for the newly introduced privilege DWC_DATAINTEGRATION where you had set so far DWC_REMOTECONNECTION with Update permission.
Also note that this addition to your custom roles will not grant additional authorizations to your users. Any user who has currently the permission Update of the existing privilege DWC_REMOTECONNECTION has the same level of authorization covered by the permissions Update and Execute with the new privilege DWC_DATAINTEGRATION.
For more information, see Privilege Types.
Check out how it works
Data Access Control: Changes to allow View Persistency
It is now allowed to persist views that have data access controls, which gives you more flexibility when persisting views in the data model.
Check out how it works
Data Access Control: Remote Authorizations from SAP BW/4HANA
You can now import analysis authorizations defined in SAP BW∕4HANA 2.0 and higher systems into SAP Data Warehouse Cloud to provide row-level protection for data in remote tables imported from these systems. The Import Permissions wizard allows you to select tables to protect and will, for each selected table, create a view to calculate its permissions, a data access control to consume them, and a second protected view to wrap the remote table and apply the data access control.
For more information, see Importing SAP BW∕4HANA Analysis Authorizations.
Check out how it works
Data Modeling
Perspective in Analytics Mode
For perspectives, you can now enable the option Run in Analytics Mode in order to optimize performance. The same option is available in the Data Builder. This sends the USE_OLAP_PLAN hint to the SQL optimizer.
For more information, see Define Perspectives.
Check out how it works
External Hierarchy support in data layer
The new Semantic Usage property Hierarchy allows you to create an external parent-child hierarchy in a view for situations where your hierarchy information is stored outside your dimension. You can add an external hierarchy to your dimension from the Hierarchies dialog or via a Hierarchy Association in the Associations list.
For more information, see Create an External Hierarchy.
Check out how it works
Introducing Runtime State in Modeling
Separation between Design Time and Run Time state enables more flexible handling user interactions, e.g. Model Deployment, Data Preview, Wrangling, CSV File Upload, etc.
Following states are exposed:
- Runtime not available
- e.g. unforeseen downtime
- Model deployment disabled, data preview disabled
- Runtime read-only
- e.g. Space storage is exceeded and locked
- Model deployment disabled, data-preview enabled
- Runtime fully available
Check out how it works
Expand highlight to join/union node
You can visualize the path of a column in a graphical view by highlighting its lineage back to their sources to better understand where a graphical view's columns come from.
For more information, see Visualizing the Lineage of Columns in a Graphical View.
Check out how it works
Refresh for SDI based connections
Update your remote data sources and resolve conflicting errors resulting from these updates. When a remote source table connected over an SDI adapter has been modified, it's now possible to update its structure from the Data Builder: SAP Data Warehouse Cloud allows you to check for changes and you are notified how they impact your table structure and dependent objects.
For more information, see Updating Remote Table Structure.
Check out how it works
Node names should be modifiable
To improve the usability and efficiency in modeling you can now rename Join, Union, Projection, Filter, and Aggregation nodes in their side panel to clearly identify them especially in large data models.
For more information, see Creating a Graphical View.
Check out how it works
Simplified Consumption in SAP Analytics Cloud
When you enable Expose for Consumption for an analytical dataset, SAP Analytics Cloud will now be able to access any dimensions and other entities to which it points via associations, even if these associated entities have not themselves been exposed.
For more information, see Creating an SQL View and Creating a Graphical View.
Check out how it works
Repository Explorer Filter Bar
In addition to a number of small cosmetic changes, the Repository Explorer now displays a filter bar listing the criteria on which you are currently filtering the list of objects.
For more information, see Repository Explorer.
Data Maintenance: usability enhancements
When invalid values are added to or duplicated in a table, a red or yellow frame appears to let you know where changes are required. Validation messages give you guidance on how to solve the issue. In addition, a standard date picker control for fields of type Date/Time has been added for easier data maintenance without losing the manual modification allowed using copy & paste.
For more information, see Maintaining Table Data.
Check out how it works
Data Maintenance: Support advance filtering and sorting
Create and apply advanced filters in a local table's Data Preview with the Define Filters dialog.
For more information, see Previewing Data and Maintaining Table Data.
Check out how it works
Business Content
Outcome-Based Business Insights
The content for SAP Analytics Cloud and Data Warehouse Cloud on Outcome-Based Business Insights helps customers transition their profitably to higher-margin solutions and outcome-based models by offering profitability monitoring and visibility of KPIs/SLAs along the life-cycle of the contract. This content is based on the upcoming the SAP Outcome-Based Business Insights (OBBI) application, which is targeted for Q4 2021
Check out how it works
SAP Data Warehouse Cloud Sample Content
The SAP Sample Content for Finance, Human Resources and Sales uses the Best Run Bikes sample data package to help you explore and learn your way around in SAP Data Warehouse Cloud. It is a great way as a first and fast starting point into data modelling in SAP Data Warehouse Cloud. The sample content supports the onboarding of new users through demonstrating product features by following a clear structure and answering a business question. This content package will be continuously updated, so make sure to check for the newest version.
The Step-by-Step guide in the overview blog post explains how to import and setup the content.
Find a detailed description of each individual LoB in the following blog post:
- SAP Data Warehouse Sample Content for LoB Finance
- SAP Data Warehouse Sample Content for LoB Human Resources
- SAP Data Warehouse Sample Content for LoB Sales
More Information
Find further information to get started with SAP Data Warehouse Cloud and check out the Best Practices on the Community for SAP Data Warehouse Cloud
Learn about the upcoming events and webinars for SAP Data Warehouse Cloud.
