Question 1: What are the high level activities to set up MDI?
Answer: High level activities can be classified as follows:
- Set up MDI tenant
- Create MDI service instances/ service keys
- Configure service destination for SOAP ( required only for Business Partner and Product Master)
- Subscribe to Master Data Orchestration and configure distribution model
Question 2: How to set up MDI in SAP customer three system landscape (Dev-Quality-Production)?
Answer: Customer can create multiple SAP Business Technology Platform BTP subaccounts in their global BTP accounts. Each BTP subaccount in which MDI is provisioned and instantiated should be considered as MDI tenant.
MDI does not categorize subaccounts as development, quality and production. So any 3 different subaccounts can be used for this purpose with each one connected to dev, quality and production customer landscape respectively.
Question 3: What could be the generic recommendation to set up MDI tenant?
Answer: As of (10/09/2021) when I am writing this blog, MDI tenant separation for customers is based on BTP subaccount.
Depending upon customer landscape set up, one or multiple BTP subaccount can be used. Few e.g. where customer might use multiple subaccounts are:
- Differentiate b/w Dev/ QA/ Prod tenant as covered with question 1
- Data segregation based on geographies. For e.g. 1 subaccount for EU region and another for US region. PS sharing of master data b/w two subaccounts (where MDI is provisioned) is not available as I write this.
For more information on MDI tenants, please refer to the corresponding
SAP help documentation link
Question 4: What would be the generic recommendation to set up MDI service instances?
Answer: One MDI instance per connected business application is recommended. Additionally one MDI instance for MDI specific configuration. For e.g. if Customer landscape has 2 business applications to be connected via MDI then total 3 MDI instances are required. 1 Each for business application and 1 for MDI.
for more information of setting up MDI service instance, please refer to the corresponding
SAP help documentation link
Question 5: What are scopes in MDI and how can they be used?
Answer: In MDI, scopes are used to provide one more layer of abstraction for business system data access.
For e.g. certain business applications could needs access to master data only while other application might need access to MDI config data+ master data. This can be controlled by assigning respective scopes at the time of MDI instance creation. For more information on scopes (specifically for business partner and product master), please refer to the corresponding
SAP help documentation link
Question 6: Can more than one MDI service instances be required for 1 business system for replication of Business Partner for e.g.?
Answer: As I write this blog, such scenarios are limited due to the MDI authentication being restricted to scenarios with application to application integration only (for e.g. via technical user/ client certificate etc.).
There are requirements wherein connected business system could need one more layer of abstraction for business user data access, for e.g. Business user 1 needs access to only MDI master data while business user 2 needs access to MDI master data+ config data from the same business application.
Since MDI cannot authenticate business users as I write this blog, such scenarios are not supported.
Question 7: Which MDI objects support SOAP interfaces?
Answer: In MDI, SOAP interfaces are supported for business partner and Product master only. This is in addition to REST (ODM based) interfaces. So, for these two objects business application can choose to connect via REST or SOAP. MDI takes care of ensuring interoperability b/w the two.
For all other master data objects, only REST interfaces are supported by MDI.
Question 8: What is Master Data orchestration and is it required to be set up with MDI?
Answer: Master Data orchestration (MDO) service is part of MDI offering and it manages data distribution criteria to various connected business applications. This also allows creation/ applications of filters among other features.
It is required to configure/ activate MDO distribution model for respective destination application in order to replicate master data from MDI.
For more information on MDO distribution model, please refer to the corresponding
SAP help documentation link
