Today, on the first day of SAP's TechEd virtual event[1], the Walldorf, Germany-based enterprise software company is making a slew of announcements, including some in the data realm. As a bonus, the company also shared some its end-of-year plans for SAP HANA Cloud with ZDNet. This post provides a summary of the announcements and plans.
Go with the (data) flow
Whether for moving data into a data warehouse, enriching data for analysis or preparing data sets for training machine learning models, data preparation and transformation is super-important. Building out data pipelines can be a tedious and, in the more purist data engineering realm, can be code-intensive too. But in the worlds of ERP, supply chain management, human capital management (HCM) and other business domains where SAP software roams, building data pipelines is a constant requirement.
Perhaps with that in mind, then, SAP is bringing to general availability its new Data Flow Builder[2] as an addition to SAP Data Warehouse Cloud[3] and as a standalone offering. Data Flow Builder makes it possible to build data pipelines bringing together both SAP and non-SAP data. Pipelines are developed visually, in a no-code/low-code fashion. Meanwhile, it's also a "no cliff" offering, allowing data engineers and others to augment visual pipelines with Python 3-based scripting if desired, and when needed.
Must read:
Data Flow Builder GA'd (i.e. was made generally available) about a month ago, but SAP is using TechEd as a launch and awareness vehicle for the new offering.
All business
Sometimes readying data for analytics involves modeling it correctly. To that end, the SAP Business Technology Platform[4] makes it easier to share data across SAP applications by providing a common data model for all business objects, called the SAP One Domain Model[5].