Smart Data Access- A new feature by HANA

In Today's world, Companies are facing challenges to optimize cost and processes in order to sustain in this grim economic condition. Business has to be dynamic and agile to keep pace with the market and technology. Business has to get information in real time to make quick decision on time and at the same time, we need to keep control over cost for IT and Technology.

Keeping Business need in view, SAP has recently introduce Smart Data Access in SAP HANA which is a Virtualization Technique. This feature is introduced from SPS6 in SAP HANA. Smart Data Access enables SAP HANA to combine data from heterogeneous sources like Teradata, Sybase IQ, SAP Sybase Adaptive Service Enterprise and Hadoop.

Smart Data Access is a technology which enables remote data access as it they are local tables in HANA without copying data into SAP HANA. Data required from other sources will remain in virtual tables. Virtual tables will point to remote tables in different data sources. It will enable real time access to data regardless of its location and at same time, it will not effect SAP HANA database. Customers can then write SQL queries in SAP HANA, which could operate on virtual tables. The HANA query processor optimizes these queries, and executes the relevant part of the query in the target database, returns the results of the query to HANA, and completes the operation.

There are few restrictions on usage of Smart Data Access:

• Data in virtual tables cannot be modified i.e. insert, update and delete operations are not possible on virtual tables. However, we can do select on virtual table and put data in HANA table.
• Virtual table does not support BLOB/CLOB data type. Workaround of this problem is to create view on remote table by excluding column of BLOB/CLOB type and then create virtual table with the help of view.
• Virtual Tables cannot be used in multi node HANA cluster. However, it is possible to access virtual table from one HANA server to other.
• Some analytical view does not support virtual tables.

For more information about Smart Data Access in HANA, you can refer to SAP note 1868209.

As of SAP HANA SPS7, there are some major changes for Smart Data Access which are as follows:

1. SAP Oracle Database 12c, SAP Sybase Event Stream Processor (ESP) 5.1 SP04 and MSSQL server 2012 version 11 are supported as data sources.
2. SDA now supports insert/update/deletion for remote databases with some limitations.
3. SDA now supports BLOBs and CLOBs as column data type of virtual table.
4. SDA has a new feature which will help to check whether SDA installation is done successfully or not.
5. SDA supports remote caching on Hive.

For more information, please refer to What's New in the SAP HANA Platform SPS7

Source: scn.sap.com