Our business in increasing demanding more than nightly loads and while that hasn’t been a problem with some of our systems, its a challenge with SAP ERP.
Has anyone implemented a near-realtime solution for SAP ? How did you go about it ?
Many of the extractors we use don’t provide deltas that work for granularities below a day, and a lot of the master data had no exposed modified datetime at all.
I am lead to understand that HANA gets around this issue by using Sybase replication server. This isn’t really a solution that can be used with data services. What are our options ?
On a related note, do rapidmarts support near-realtime extracts ?
First it has to be said that SAP ERP itself does not support that. If the source does not support it we have to hack it somehow.
IDOC is certainly an option but these tend to be heavy. If you have IDOCs configured already than I would go via that route, enabling them just for this use case I would be reluctant and writing new ones people usually do not have the skill set at the customer site.
Other things I had seen is simply running the delta process often, e.g. every 30 minutes. Depending on how efficient your existing delta dataflow is that might work or might not. Usually it works for a few where the is a log table in SAP or a timestamp (and no deletes) but is not a generic solution.
What I have seen as well is solving this task in the database and not in ERP. Think about you create a transparent table in the ABAP layer with the columns TABLENAME, PRIMARY_KEY_VALUE, OPERATION, TIMESTAMP.
No you create database triggers for each table you care inserting a record into this change-table. Now you have an easy way to figure out what was changed, therefore can build a delta dataflow for that which is more efficient and hence run it more often.
btw, that is what SAP SLT does.
I think we will try your approach of running deltas more regularly. The challenge is with Master data, where we need to do full loads due to some extractors (and presumably the underlying tables they are based on) not having an exposed modified date.
Do you know what SAP’s roadmap is on this is ? I’m sure a lot of businesses will move away from ECC if it doesn’t support this in the future.
(BOB member since 2012-01-17)
(BOB member since 2004-12-17)