Difference between DataSphere Data Lake and HDI Container

[Charan-V]

Hi Experts,

Would like to understand the difference between DataSphere Data Lake and HDI container and when to use what?.

Per my understanding, both seem to be the same purpose of storing high-volume data with free-hand SQL operation

Thanks in advance.

[Sebastian_Gesiarz]

Both SAP Datasphere Data Fabric and SAP CAP are services running on SAP BTP that can be used interchangeably, but they have different purposes and functionalities. You can find more information about the mixed use cases in Exchanging Data with SAP SQL Data Warehousing HDI Containers.

SAP Datasphere Data Fabric is a cloud data warehouse that comes with semantical modeling and business workspaces. It is a service available on the SAP BTP platform and uses Cloud Foundry and HDI containers for its spaces. It is positioned by SAP as a Strategic choice for Data Warehousing. Unlike CAP, Datasphere does not support GIT and runs on CDS artifacts bondled in JSON files. It has SAP Data Intelligence embedded which runs in containers within SAP Datasphere. The plan is to migrate more functionalities of SAP DI into SAP Datasphere until both products are merged. The plan is also to provide a seamless planning experience for SAC Planning where SAP Datasphere would act as a Data Foundation for planning. Additionally, the Datasphere offers BW/4HANA in the cloud as a bridge for customers migrating from BW or wanting to reuse some of its business content for data extraction from ECC systems.

SAP CAP, on the other hand, can be used as an SQL data warehouse in the cloud, and it is more suited for developing multi-target applications (MTA) including web than data warehouse modeling as we know it from BW. Customers who were running a Virtual Data Warehouse on HANA XS or XSA are advised to migrate into CAP, as it has extensive support for all the data modeling features we know from XS and XSA, including many more, and open support to Visual Studio Code, JAVA runtime, and so on. However, it requires more technical knowledge to develop on CAP than in Datasphere, where many functionalities are provided graphically and with a low-code approach.

It is possible to enable CAP on SAP Datasphere and reuse its features. This provides users with the opportunity to combine the strengths of both products and create a powerful data warehousing solution that can cater to different needs and preferences. Overall, both provide robust HANA Cloud data warehousing solutions.