Getting started with SAP HANA SDI in less than a day

Getting started with SAP HANA SDI in less than a day

(The Twitter case) – Part 1

I was recently asked by a client’s marketing department to figure out how to bring Twitter data to their reporting environment. They are currently using a BW-on-HANA, so I immediately thought of HANA Smart Data Integration (SDI) as a possible candidate. In this blog I’ll cover the basics for the setup and show you that it’s actually quite easy to get up-and-running with SDI. In fact: I was pulling data from Twitter less than 3 hours after starting this SDI adventure .

This is part 1 of the series. Herein, we’ll cover the SDI Setup.

(Check out part 2 to see how you can create dataflows within SDI)

FYI: I’m going to assume that you have the necessary rights on your HANA box to perform all described steps. For more info on the needed privileges, check out section 2.1 of the official SAP HANA EIM Administration Guide.

SDI Architecture:

First, let’s take a look at the basic architecture behind SDI. There are 2 main parts:

  • The ‘Data Provisioning Server’, located in your HANA box
  • A ‘Data Provisioning Agent’, which you typically install on a separate machine

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DP Server Setup:

The DP Server comes pre-installed with HANA, but you still need to ‘enable’ the service.

  • In the HANA Studio, double-click on the HANA system, go to ‘configuration’ and put the number of dpserver instances to ‘1’ (deamon.ini –> dpserver –> instances)

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DP Agent Install:

width=FYI: The DP Agent is not always needed.

There are quite a lot of sources covered by

the DP Server already. Here’s the list from

our system:

For our Twitter example we do need the DP Agent, so let’s look at the installation & setup:

FYI: For testing purposes it’s perfectly fine to install the agent on your own laptop. As long as you leave your laptop on and connected to the same network as your HANA box, it will work. Later on, when you want to use SDI productively, you’ll have to setup a dedicated machine for the agent.

You can get the agent from the SAP Software Center at https://launchpad.support.sap.com/#/softwarecenter

  • Search for ‘DP Agent’
  • Choose the latest available SP/Patch for your HANA platform (2.0 in my case).
  • I’ll go for the Windows version here, as it’s easy for anyone to install

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  • Make sure you also download the SAPCAR utility (search for ‘SAPCAR’)

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  • To extract the .SAR archive, open a command prompt or PowerShell window and run the SAPCAR executable with option -xvf

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  • In the extracted folder, run ‘exe’.
  • For most parts you can just do the usual “Next, Next, Finish” . On the 2nd step you’ll have to give some info though:
    • Your agent will run as a service inside Windows. You have to give this service a name.
    • The service needs an existing Windows user. If your testing on your own machine and want to use you own user, just open a command prompt and type ‘whoami’ to find out your domain and user.

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DP Agent Configuration:

  • Open the configuration tool from the desktop shortcut
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FYI: The 1st time you have to do it with Administrator privileges. Later on, you only need to open it as admin when you want to stop/start the service

The configuration exists of 3 steps:

  1. Connect to HANA
  2. Register your agent with HANA (check your IP with command ‘ipconfig’ in cmd)
  3. Register one or more Adapters with HANA

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That’s it! You’re completely done with the SDI setup.

Check out part 2 to see how you can create dataflows within SDI…