Predictive Analytics Library and how an integration to ABAP can look like

On 23th of November I had the chance to speak at SAP Inside Track Vienna - #sitVIE about predictive analytics and how an ABAP integration can look like. It was a quite fun experience and I want to share my thoughts on that topic.

The motivation

The world of SAP changed tremendously in the last decade. Ten years ago, the idea of having a self-learning ERP-System was a far away dream. Today you can integrate multiple technologies for machine learning with almost no effort.

The landscape

SAP has changed the strategy from “data to code” to “code to data”. Calculations, conversions, etc. should be done on database level. Simple said but this has a huge impact on application development.

The Predictive Analytics Library

This library runs exclusively on SAP HANA and is one door opener for the intelligent enterprise. It allows you to use machine learning functions which are included in this library. And on top you can also integrate models from different platforms which are available on the market. So there is no need to stick to the functions of SAP Predictive Analytics Library.

The ABAP Integration

The most important tool within the SAP Predictive Analytics Library is the so-called ?Flow-Graph“ which allows to drag & drop the sources, functions and result-tables into one flow-model. The flow-graph-model is nothing else than a generated stored procedure which can be called by the ABAP-Stack via AMDPs (ABAP Managed Database Procedures).

The Frontend

For the display of the prediction results CDS-Views (Core Data Service) are the way to go. Those views allow you to show the results in real-time and on different platforms on-premise or in the SAP Analytics Cloud.

The conclusion

There are many ways to make a system intelligent. This was only one. I hope the short ex-curse helped to get an idea how to integrate SAP PAL to ABAP.