Organizations are collecting massive amounts of data such as data in ERP, purchase information from point-of-sale systems, click-stream from the websites, sales data from various regions, inventory data from warehouses, and data from your support channels. Unless you have systems and resources to generate actionable insights from this data in real-time, your organization is not gaining a competitive edge, and actually burdening IT resources to maintain that data.
Analytics workloads, SQL queries that run complex joins and aggregations, have high throughput requirements. So organizations that run their transactional workloads on the same database as the analytics workloads experience poor performance. Organizations need better performance for their analytical workloads, which only a dedicated data warehouse application can solve. That’s why a number of organizations are not just building their massive data lakes, to store all types of raw data – structured, unstructured, and semi-structured, in the cloud but also moving to cloud-based data warehouses. If you are using industry-leading ERP applications from SAP you have one more significant option to consider: SAP Data Warehouse Cloud.
SAP Data Warehouse Cloud makes it easy for people and businesses to connect to this data. It frees up IT from procuring and managing environments for a cloud data warehouse while enabling business teams to create stories from the data that can chart the future of their business. SAP Data Warehouse Cloud gives ultimate flexibility to organizations to optimize it for either performance, cost, or governance while maintaining one strong semantic layer. With such a game-changing technology, you don’t want to restrict it to just your SAP data, and that’s where SnapLogic comes in. SnapLogic is an enterprise-grade integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) solution that helps you connect all applications and data that your enterprise uses effortlessly without writing any code. SnapLogic has over 500 pre-built connectors called Snaps to popular applications in the ERP, CRM, and HCM space, and on-premises and cloud-based data stores.
One of the key challenges with using a data warehouse solution is doing data migration. This includes the initial bulk data migration and then keeping the data in the data warehouses in sync. When doing the data migration, organizations have to be mindful of
- Schema conversion
- Conversion of database native operations (stored procedures)
- Using the SAP Data Warehouse Cloud for your analytical workload
Traditional approaches such as migrating data via ETL are burdensome because it forces your skilled resources to spend considerable time writing and debugging code. In these settings, the risk of schema errors is high.
A better approach is to automate this migration process with SnapLogic’s Intelligent Integration Platform (IIP) platform. SnapLogic visual designer interface (shown below) closes the skills gap by allowing your team to build these workflows without writing code, with simple configuration. This reduces the cost and effort of moving large volumes of data. With our pre-built connector to SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, you can rapidly load large volumes of data without writing a single line of code.
SAP Data Warehouse Cloud Load Snap consumes data from an upstream source, automatically converts it to the JSON for easy readability and transformations while it streams through the SnapLogic platform, and loads it into the SAP Data Warehouse Cloud without the user having to manually intervene and take care of schema compatibility checks. Effectively, the Snap allows the user to replicate a table from one database to the SAP Data Warehouse Cloud.
Here are sample workflows that create schema into SAP Data Warehouse Cloud and then load data into the ‘Sales Orders’ table:
After the initial loading, you can keep the source system in sync with SAP Data Warehouse Cloud painlessly. This is done by leveraging triggered events or by scheduling a batch workload for your SnapLogic pipelines. With triggered events, users will get real-time updates to the SAP DW Cloud. On the other hand, users can control the timing and frequency of the batch execution to meet their business needs e.g. you can move the purchase information from a database to SAP Data Warehouse Cloud on an hourly basis or move a summarized click-stream data on your e-commerce platform on a nightly basis. Additionally, for both batch and real-time integration use cases, SnapLogic enables creation and management of APIs from the integration pipelines that could be exposed to other API consumers, within or outside your organization, to improve collaboration between teams.
In addition to keeping data in sync, SnapLogic IIP provides a number of features to recover from errors that can be hard to track and resolve. SnapLogic provides error output for all Snaps and users can leverage them to identify and resolve pipeline errors quickly. In the case of network failures, the platform automatically retries the scheduled pipelines that were not successfully executed. Additionally, the platform provides resumable pipelines that help recover from source or target endpoint failures to provide exactly-once guaranteed data delivery.
You now have a great tool in SAP Data Warehouse Cloud to enable your business teams with means to get insights quickly without burdening your IT teams but you need a partner to get all your organizational data to the SAP Data Warehouse Cloud seamlessly, without writing or maintaining code. SnapLogic is that partner. If you are interested in learning more about how SnapLogic works with SAP Data Warehouse Cloud and other SAP technologies such as SAP Analytics Cloud, SAP Hana please sign up for our free trial program.
