North American Energy Transportation and Services Company
Customer & challenge
The oil & gas company was using custom developed ABAP programs to collect data from over 100 SAP ERP tables and to push the data
into a SQL Server data warehouse. When the company decided to migrate to S/4HANA and adopt SAP’s HEC (HANA Enterprise Cloud) as cloud hosting service, the process was no longer working.
A full replication of the larger source tables into SQL Server was no longer possible, and even an incremental data feed could now take 6-8 hours to complete. The end users in Power BI would no longer have access to up-to-date information. The company decided to upgrade to a fast link network connection to the cloud, without the improvements they were hoping for. An effort to re-write and optimize the ABAP code also proved to be unsuccessful.
“Xtract IS is the perfect solution for us.”
Solution Architect, BI & Analytics
Solution with Xtract IS
The company decided to give Xtract IS a try. They were already using Microsoft’s SSIS (SQL Server Integration Services) and had experience with the development and deployment of SSIS packages. Xtract IS added the SAP data extraction capabilities to their existing SSIS environment and they were able to run the first tests against S/4HANA in HEC within days after downloading the trial version. Incremental table loads, based on time-stamps, now completed in 10-15 minutes. A full table replication was again possible, even for the larger tables, and the company is running them once a week
for a full synchronization with the data warehouse. The company is planning to expand the use of Xtract IS to additional functional areas in SAP.
Challenge
Establishing a continuous and performant data
stream from SAP S/4HANA to Microsoft SQL
Server and Power BI.
System environment
» SAP HEC (HANA Enterprise Cloud)
» SAP S/4HANA
» Microsoft SQL Server (current: on-prem, future:
Azure SQL)
» Microsoft SSIS (Integration Services)
Advantages
» Reliable, performant SAP data extraction
» Support for incremental loads, near real-time feed
» Hybrid infrastructure: connecting SAP HEC with on-premise SQL Server
» Short time to solution (weeks instead of months)
» Lowered TCO compared to ABAP development
