The team here at Clariba has had some time to explore the new features available in the most recent version of SAP Data Services. If you’re not already using the latest version of 4.2, we’d strongly recommend it, particularly if you’re also using SAP HANA as your data warehousing solution.

We’ve identified five key reasons why it makes sense for organisations to make the switch, ranging from overall impact on data integration to specific additions in the new version which will improve the efficiency of your day-today processes. 

If you decide to make the switch, you’ll also find some tips for best practice when implementing the update towards the end of this article.

1. More intuitive

The latest version of SAP Data Services includes a number of changes which improve the intuitiveness, intelligence and flexibility of the suite, particularly when it comes to data integration.

2. Greater robustness

In the version 4.2, SAP has overhauled several elements which improve overall reliability and performance when compared to previous versions.

3. Better for big data apps

New features which specifically benefit big data applications include real-time data provisioning, improves integration over SAP HANA and unlocking SAP ECC data assets.

4. Improvements to replication

The latest update centralizes SAP ERP and non-SAP data replication within a single solution, bringing together the SAP Sybase Replication Server and SAP LT Replication Server. It also includes complex data transformations and data quality management in replication processes.

5. Real time insights

Integration with SAP HANA has been improved, giving you real time insights into your data with instant profiling. It also allows you to push down data transformation to SAP HANA and enables faster loading with parallel data extraction, alongside partitioned data load and multimode data load.

Essentially, there’s a lot to be gained by making the upgrade to the latest version 4.2 as soon as possible. If you’re unsure about the best way to approach this, we’ve got a few useful tips to guide you in the right direction (based on SAP’s own recommendations):

• Remember to validate that all connections to databases, SAP ERP, etc. are working.

• Be careful when using Data Quality Transformations, the Upgrade may not support them.

• Make sure that your Data Services Objects (i.e. Dataflows, Workflows, etc) don’t contain spaces in their names.

• Define join ranks before migrating.

• Do not copy your old repository database into the new Data Services system database. Copy the old version .atl into an old version empty repository and upgrade it.

• Validate old jobs before migrating. The Repository Manager will not upgrade broken jobs and may cause the whole upgrade to fail.

• Do not use the function lookup_ext() on your deployments, it may mask possible errors after the migration.

As always, if you would like to discuss the upgrade to the latest version of SAP Data Services 4.2 in more detail, or you have specific questions about the benefits we’ve outlined above, do feel free to get in touch with one of our team for a more in-depth analysis.