SAP BW Connector: Overview¶

Alation Cloud Service Applies to Alation Cloud Service instances of Alation

Customer Managed Applies to customer-managed instances of Alation

The OCF connector for SAP BW is developed by Alation and is available as a Zip file that can be uploaded and installed in the Alation application. This connector supports cataloging SAP BW and SAP BW/4HANA data sources.

To download the SAP BW OCF connector package, go to the Alation Connector Hub available from the Customer Portal. Go to Customer Portal > Connectors > Alation Connector Hub. Only Alation users with access to the Customer Portal can access the Alation Connector Hub. If you don’t have access to the Customer Portal, contact Alation Support.

Extraction from an SAP BW data source requires the use of a separate tool—Alation Rala. Cataloging metadata from SAP BW in Alation includes two stages:

Using Alation Rala to extract metadata and export it to JSON files

Using the OCF Connector for SAP BW to extract metadata from the source JSON files into the Alation catalog.

The exported JSON files that you want ingested into the Alation catalog will need to be placed onto a supported storage system. The connector can work with three storage systems:

Amazon S3

Azure Storage

Windows SMB file share.

Create a ticket with Alation Support about receiving the SAP BW connector package and the Alation Rala package.

Team¶

You may need the assistance of your SAP administrator and your storage system administrator to configure the use of the SAP BW connector end to end, which involves the following activities:

Install Alation Rala in your network

Provide a database as the Alation Rala Repository

Grant the appropriate access rights for Alation Rala to connect to SAP ECC

Extract metadata from SAP ECC into Alation Rala Repository

Export metadata from Alation Rala to the JSON format

Procure storage for the exported JSON files and collect access information for Alation.

Scope¶

The table below describes which metadata objects are extracted by the connector and which catalog functionality is supported.

Feature	Scope	Availability
Authentication
Depends on the storage system	Azure Storage Azure Storage account name Azure Storage key Windows SMB SMB file share user SMB file share password Amazon S3 User access key ID User secret access key	Yes
SSL		No
Metadata extraction (MDE)
Default MDE (full extraction)	Extraction of metadata from JSON exports available on a supported storage system Selective MDE is not supported	Yes
Custom query-based MDE	Not applicable	No
Extracted metadata objects
Data Source	Data source object in Alation that is parent to extracted metadata	Yes
Schemas	List of schemas	Yes
Tables	List of tables	Yes
Columns	List of columns	Yes
Views	List of views	Yes
Source comments	Some asset attributes are extracted as source comments	Yes
Primary keys	Primary key information for extracted tables	Yes
Foreign keys	Foreign key information for extracted tables	Yes
Sampling and Profiling		No
Query Log Ingestion (QLI)		No
Compose		No
Popularity		No
Lineage
Direct lineage based on MDE *	Alation calculates lineage based on the relationship files exported from SAP BW. The relations represent references between SAP BW assets. Alation extracts the source asset names, target asset names, and relationship type, and builds lineage between source tables, target tables, and dataflow objects. The name of the relationship is added to the dataflow content. Lineage data is available on the Lineage tab on catalog pages of tables	Yes

* The direct lineage feature is enabled by default from Alation version 2023.1. On earlier versions, you can enable it by setting the alation_conf parameter alation.ocf.mde.direct_lineage.enable_extraction to True. With this setting in True, Alation will calculate the direct lineage data for your BW data source during MDE.

Object Mapping Between SAP BW and Alation¶

See the table below for more details on object mapping between SAP BW and Alation:

Asset types are represented as schemas.

Tables are mapped to asset names. For example, an object CUB: DCABWCJC1 will be a table in Alation in a schema mapped onto a SapBwCube asset. The logical name and the full path to a table-level object will be extracted into the Source Comments field available on the catalog page of this object.

Some asset types are fields to other asset types. These atomic field level asset types are represented as columns.

SAP Asset Type

Alation Object

SapBwCube

SapBwHcpr

SapBwDso

SapBwAdso

SapBwDsource

SapBwISource

SapBwOHub

SapBwAggrLv

SapBwOpenOdsV

SapBwQuery

SapBwInfoObject

SapBwFieldGroup

SapBwReusableComp

SapBwInfoArea

Schema

SapBwField

SapBwInfoObjectAttribute

Column

Supported Relationships¶

Relationships Metadata

Used for

ViewComposedOfView

ViewComposedOfTable

SapBwInfoObjectDerivedRef

SapBwDataStructureReusableCompRef

SapBwDataStructureNavAttributeRef

SapBwDataStructureFieldGroup

SapBwDataStructureBasedOnRef

DataAssetGroupToDataStructure

DataAssetGroupHierarchyRef

Table-level lineage

SapBwFieldGroupFieldRef

SapBwDataStructureField

ColumnTable

Column to table relationship

SapBwFieldReuseableCompRef

SapBwFieldInfoObjectRef

ColumnViewLinkColumn

ColumnFKeyColumn

Foreign keys and lineage

Supported Asset Attributes¶

Asset Attributes	Extracted as
PhysicalName	Name of the Alation object
LogicalName LongDescription	Source comments
ColumnPosition	Ordinal position of column object
IsPrimaryKey	Primary key information
DataType IsNullable	Column properies
TableType RowCount Size DecimalPlaces DataElement Domain LogicalDataType DbmsDataType IsMarkedColumn IsLinkedToMarkedColumn IsMarkedOrLinkedColumn SapBwInfoObjectType SapBwInfoProviderType SapBwInfoObjectAttributeType SapBwReusableCompType MetaDataChanged	Not supported

Limitations¶

The connector does not support parallel streaming and only streams from one source at a time.
You may notice a short delay in displaying lineage after successful MDE. This is due to the time required to calculate the direct lineage. The delay is proportional to the size of the extracted metadata and may vary from several seconds to a few minutes.