Native DSOs to the rescue for a Native HANA SQL Data Warehousing Approach

SAP strategy for data warehousing has long been associated with a single end-to-end data warehousing and business intelligence application : SAP Business Warehouse (BW).

Today extended strategy is 3-fold, it offers a wealth of possibilities and is completely based on the SAP HANA platform.

The SAP BW approach is the one for companies looking for a guided approach. SAP BW is an architected, prepackaged, end-to-end Data Warehouse solution with best practices that eliminates the need to have to start projects from scratch with detailed SQL data definition statements. It includes all-around functionnality from data acquisition through preparation, modeling, data lifecycle management, versioning, administration and monitoring. It is optimized for SAP software based processes and data semantics. It has a deep, built-in understanding of SAP HANA datasources and has proven to be succesful in dealing with SAP application data. SAP BW continues to improve as demonstrated by the most recent BW4HANA release.

The SAP SQL approach, also sometime called Native HANA Data Warehousing approach, is for companies seeking for more flexibly or for IT teams used to a bare metal SQL approach to build their data warehouse or data marts. This approach offers freedom to build custom data models and data management processes, independent of any model presumptions. It allows for different modeling approaches such as data vault instead of star schema. It supports for the flexible creation of data marts that are as simple or as complex and as small or as large as a scenario requires. It is offering access to best-of-breed tools – provided by SAP or a third party of your choice – and unlike a monolithic approach, it offers the flexibility to exchange single tools instead of an entire stack in response to technology advancements.

Finally, thanks to SAP BW’s tight integration with and optimization for SAP HANA, it’s also possible for customers to opt for the mixed approach that combines the architected approach of SAP BW and the flexible approach offered by the SQL approach. SAP BW can expose its models and data as views in SAP HANA. The views can then be accessed through native interfaces of SAP HANA such as SQL. They can also be used in additional SAP HANA applications such as scripts and procedures. On the contrary, SAP HANA views can be integrated into SAP BW. These capabilities make native-SQL-generated artifacts in the database and the artifacts generated by SAP BW exchangeable, transformable, and “cascadable” to a certain degree, thus enabling the mixed approach.

With SAP HANA 2.0 came the Native Datastore Objects (NDSO)

For customers wanting to leverage the flexibility and agility delivered by a Native HANA SQL approach to build their Data Warehouse and Data Marts, the Native DSOs provide a central persistence object with capabilities identical to the ones offered by the BW Advanced Datastore Object (ADSO)

• The NDSO supports the data merge process of delta- and full-data load requests into their reportable content.
• In addition, it provides the capability to identify and process the delta dataset (modified dataset compared to the previous data load request) for connected NDSOs.
• Measures and attributes of the NDSO can be merged by a simple move or an aggregation step and the NDSO supports the process to handle records that are marked for deletion within the delta data sets processing.
• The NDSO offers multiple ways to interoperate between a SAP HANA SQL (native) data warehousing and SAP HANA Business Warehouse systems, which is equal on how the data is processed within a single SAP BW system. The SAP BW ADSO is capable to identify and process the delta data set from the NDSO and vice versa.
• The NDSO is based on the SAP HANA XS advanced application server framework, which includes SAP HANA Development Infrastructure (DevX), SAP HANA Web IDE, SAP HANA Deployment Infrastructure (HDI) and SAP HANA Core Data Services (HANA CDS).
• The NDSO is an addition to the SAP HANA certified ETL/ELT tools, and not a replacement and functions with the HANA certified ETL-tools. The NDSO provides SAP HANA additional integrated technical services, like delta data set processing or request management, which would need to be created, tested, validated and optimized manually within the according ETL/ELT tool capabilities.
• Native datastore objects will be represented as annotated CDS contexts, this includes all tables (meta and metadata). The surrounding context serves as the "datastore object".

If you're interested by knowing more about the NDSOs, how to create them, how to provision data into them and discover the capabilities they have to offer, I recommend the 4 small videos created by the SAP HANA Academy on Youtube. Here is the first of them, enjoy the watching and wish you good native data warehousing experience on SAP HANA.