Best way to read data from S/4HANA.

[former_member372522]

Hi, some of my customers are starting to move from SAP ECC to S/HANA.

I need to understand which "old" method we have implemented for SAP ECC (ABAP Dataflow, RFC, Direct access, ecc) are still supported for S/HANA and which are the new ones.

These informations we enable us to understand what MUST to be changed in our extraction flows in order to support S/4HANA as data source and what instead CAN be changed later to follow best practices and tune the performances

Thanks in advance

[Jocelyn_Dart]

hi Achille

Re what to move to after migration

In S/4H there's a very strong focus on using CDS views - especially for Fiori & analytics

Rgds Jocelyn

[Former Member]

Depends on what you reading. I would recommend exploring the live views SAP has to offer. I think reading thru abap layer using RFC and ABAP dataflows work. with S4hana SAP has released embedded analytics(Live views), if you can leverage these it would actually save you a lot of time and faster reads. you create custom views on s4hana as needed too.

I would recommend creating a bus layer of all your data thru views and using bods to move data from views to target systems. in a typical pre s4 sap world access db directly is frowned upon. but i think with s4 that thinking has to change because of the embedded analytics solutions and the direction of sap's road map.

Hope this helps

Good luck.

[vijy_mukunthan]

Hi Achille

There are multiple ways to extract the data

1) As usual you can connect to ABAP data flow to extract the data from S/4 HANA but I did not test this.

2) You can connect directly to HANA DB and pull the data which will be very fast. Make sure you use only for extraction not for any update.

3) All the old ECC tables are still available like MARA,MARC,VBAK,EKKO,EKPO, VBAP

Thanks and Regards

Vijay

[joachimrees1]

Hi Achille,

as a general rule I'd say all the old stuff (RFC etc.) should still work;

If you want to use the up-to-date technologies that would be OData!

best

Joachim

[roberto_vacca2]

Hi.

I suggest you to read this note and related content.

1912445 - ABAP custom code migration for SAP HANA - recommendations and Code Inspector variants for SAP HANA migration.

Hope to help

Bye

[former_member372522]

Thanks Roberto, but this note is related to the migration of the ABAP code in general. Data services self generates the ABAP code for the extraction with abap data flow, so if the abap data flow and the SAP Applications datastore are supported for S/4HANA my expectation is that the self generated ABAP code works correctly.

Thanks anyway

[roberto_vacca2]

Behind all SAP technologies, there's ABAP code mixed with theorical concepts of objects and data mining. So, as you said, there is abap code behind data services. If you want to test if something is good for HANA, note 1912445 tells you if it's ok. SAPScript and Smartforms, for example, still work so nothing let me think that something can't work anymore. new In S4 a new Output Management approach is in place. Probably old technologies will work slowly or at all, and this will make angry managers 🙂 . As Joachim says , changing instrument, using oData can be a solution.

Bye