SAP HANA SDI ECC Source vs HANA table delta - hana

In our current system, we have a lot of ECC tables replicated to SAP HANA with SDI (Smart Data Integration). Replication tasks can be real-time or on demand, but sometimes a replication task comes too late and the data in the replicated table is very different from the source table.
What would be the best approach in SAP HANA to check these delta values?
ERP system uses DB2 database
DB2LogReaderAdapter is used to read DB2 database tables
Remote source is created in the Cloud (Virtual table)
There are about 260 replication tasks
Replication tasks contain only one object
Replication tasks are based on virtual tables
The biggest issue faced right now is latency in the remote source tables (delta values)

There is no easy/straightforward way to "check" delta values here.
The 260 replication tasks are processed independently from each other; regardless of transactional compounding in the source system.
That means, that if table A and B are updated in the same transaction, but replicated in separate tasks to HANA, the data will be written to HANA in separate transactions. The data in HANA will be lagging behind the source system.
Usually, this difference should only last a relatively short time (maybe a few secs.), but, of course, if you do aggregation queries and want to see current valid sums etc. this leads to wrong data.
One way to deal with this is to implement the queries in a way that takes this into account, by e.g. filtering on data that has been changed half an hour ago (or longer), and to exclude newer data.
Note that as the replication via LogReader is de-coupled from the source system's transaction processing, this problem of "lagging data" is built-in conceptionally and cannot be generally avoided.
All one can do is to reduce the extend of the lag and cope with the differences in the upstream processing.
This very issue is one of the reasons for why remote data access is usually preferred over replication for cases like operational reporting.
And if you do need data-loading (e.g. to avoid additional load on the source system) then a ETL/ELT approach into data stores (DWH/BW-like) makes the situation a lot better structures.
In fact, the current S/4 HANA & BW/4 HANA setups usually use a combination of scheduled data loads and ad-hoc fetching of new data via operational delta queues from the source system.

Lars,
If we need to replicate data from ECC on Oracle to a HANA instance, should we use SLT (because of cluster tables for example) or SDI already covers all functionality SLT provides?
Regards, Chris

Related

Creating a Datawarehouse

Currently our team is having a major database management/data management issue where hundreds of databases are being built and used for minor/one off applications where the app should really be pulling from an already existing database.
Since our security is so tight, the owners of these Systems of authority will not allow others to pull data from them at a consistent (App Necessary) rate, rather they allow a single app to do a weekly pull and that data is then given to the org.
I am being asked to compile all of those publicly available (weekly snapshots) into a single data warehouse for end users to go to. We realistically are talking 30-40 databases each with hundreds of thousands of records.
What is the best way to turn this into a data warehouse? Create a SQL server and treat each one as its own DB on the server? As far as the individual app connections I am less worried, I really want to know what is the best practice to house all of the data for consumption.
What you're describing is more of a simple data lake. If all you're being asked for is a single place for the existing data to live as-is, then sure, directly pulling all 30-40 databases to a new server will get that done. One thing to note is that if they're creating Database Snapshots, those wouldn't be helpful here. With actual database backups, it would be easy to build a process that would copy and restore those to your new server. This is assuming all of the sources are on SQL Server.
"Data warehouse" implies a certain level of organization beyond that, to facilitate reporting on an aggregate of the data across the multiple sources. Generally you'd identify any concepts that are shared between the databases and create a unified table for each concept, then create an ETL (extract, transform, load) process to standardize the data from each source and move it into those unified tables. This would be a large lift for one person to build. There's plenty of resources that you could read to get you started--Ralph Kimball's The Data Warehouse Toolkit is a comprehensive guide.
In either case, a tool you might want to look into is SSIS. It's good for copying data across servers and has drivers for multiple different RDBMS platforms. You can schedule SSIS packages from SQL Agent. It has other features that could help for data warehousing as well.

Staging tables in DB vs storage area

Typically on an on-premise SQL server ETL workflow via SSIS, we load data from anywhere into staging tables and then apply validation and transformations to load/merge them into downstream data warehouse tables.
My question is if we should do something similar on Azure, where we have set of staging tables and downstream tables in azure SQL database or use azure storage area as staging and move data from there into final downstream tables via ADF.
As wild is it may seem, we also have a proposal to have separate staging database and downstream database, between which we move using ADF.
There are different models for doing data movement pipelines and no single one is perfect. I'll make a few comments on the common patterns I see in case that will help you make decisions on your application.
For many data warehouses where you are trying to stage in data and create dimensions, there is often a process where you load the raw source data into some other database/tables as raw data and then process it into the format you want to insert into your fact and dimension tables. That process is complicated by the fact that you may have data arrive late or data that is corrected on a later day, so often these systems are designed using partitioned tables on the target fact tables to allow re-processing of a partition worth of data (e.g. a day) without having to reprocess the whole fact table. Furthermore, the transformation process on that staging table may be intensive if the data itself is coming in a form far away from how you want to represent it in your DW. Often in on-premises systems, these are handled in a separate database (potentially on the same SQL Server) to isolate it from the production system. Furthermore, it is sometimes the case that these staging tables are re-creatable from original source data (CSV files or similar), so it is not the store of record for that source material. This allows you to consider using simple recovery mode on that database (which reduces the Log IO requirements and recovery time compared to full recovery). While not every DW uses full recovery mode for the processed DW data (some do dual load to a second machine instead since the pipeline is there), the ability to use full recovery plus physical log replication (AlwaysOn Availability Groups) in SQL Server gives you the flexibility to create a disaster recovery copy of the database in a different region of the world. (You can also do query read scale-out on that server if you would like). There are variations on this basic model, but a lot of on-premises systems have something like this.
When you look at SQL Azure, there are some similarities and some differences that matter when considering how to set up an equivalent model:
You have full recovery on all user databases (but tempdb is in simple recovery). You also have quorum-commit of your changes to N replicas (like in Availability Groups) when using v-core or premium dbs which matters a fair amount because you often have a more generic network topology in public cloud systems vs. a custom system you build yourself. In other words, log commit times may be slower than your current system. For batch systems it does not necessarily matter too much, but you need to be careful to use large enough batch sizes so that you are not waiting on the network all the time in your application. Given that your staging table may also be a SQL Azure database, you need to be aware that it also has quorum commit so you may want to consider which data is going to stay around day-over-day (stays in SQL Azure DB) vs. which can go into tempdb for lower latencies and be re-created if lost.
There is no intra-db resource governance model today in SQL Azure (other than elastic pools which is partial and is targeting a different use case than DW). So, having a separate staging database is a good idea since it isolates your production workload from the processing in the staging database. You avoid noisy neighbor issues with your primary production workload being impacted by the processing of the day's data you want to load.
When you provision machines for on-premises DW, you often buy a sufficiently large storage array/SAN that you can host your workload and potentially many others (consolidation scenarios). The premium/v-core DBs in SQL Azure are set up with local SSDs (with Hyperscale being the new addition where it gives you some cross-machine scale-out model that is a bit like a SAN in some regards). So, you would want to think through the IOPS required for your production system and your staging/loading process. You have the ability to choose to scale up/down each of these to better manage your workload and costs (unlike a CAPEX purchase of a large storage array which is made up front and then you tune workloads to fit into it).
Finally, there is also a SQL DW offering that works a bit differently than SQL Azure - it is optimized for larger DW workloads and has scale-out compute with the ability to scale that up/down as well. Depending on your workload needs, you may want to consider that as your eventual DW target if that is a better fit.
To get to your original question - can you run a data load pipeline on SQL Azure? Yes you can. There are a few caveats compared to your existing experiences on-premises, but it will work. To be fair, there are also people who just load from CSV files or similar directly without using a staging table. Often they don't do as many transformations, so YMMV based on your needs.
Hope that helps.

wso2cep : Data Storage in addition to display

I was wondering if in addition to process and display data on dashboard in wso2cep, can I store it somewhere for a long period of time to get further information later? I have studied there are two types of tables used in wso2cep, in-memory and rdbms tables.
Which one should I choose?
There is one more option that is to switch to wso2das. Is it a good approach?
Is default database is fine for that purpose or I should move towards other supported databases like sql, orcale etc?
In-memory or RDBMS?
In-memory tables will internally use java collections structures, so it'll get destroyed once the JVM is terminated (after server restart, data won't be available). On the other hand, RDBMS tables will persist data permanently. For your scenario, I think you should proceed with RDBMS tables.
CEP or DAS?
CEP will only provide real-time analytics, where DAS provides batch analytics (with Spark SQL) in addition to real-time analytics. If you have a scenario which require batch processing, incremental processing, etc ... You can go ahead with DAS. Note that, migration form CEP to DAS is quite simple (since the artifacts are identical).
Default (H2) DB or other DB?
By default WSO2 products use embedded H2 DB as data source. However, it's recommended to use MySQL or Oracle in production environments.

SQL Server Architecture on Production Environment

I want to understand the best approach for SQL Server architecture on production environment.
Here is my problem:
I have database which has on average around 20,000 records being inserted every second in various tables.
We have reports also implemented for the same, now what's happening is whenever reports is searched by user, performance of other application steeps down.
We have implemented
Table Partitioning
Indexing
And all other required things.
My question is: can anyone suggest an architecture that have different SQL Server databases for reports and application, and they can sync themselves online every time when new data is entered in master SQL Server?
Some what like Master and Slave Architecture. I understand Master and Slave architecture, however need to get more idea around it.
Our main tables are having around 40 millions rows (table partitioning done)
In SQL Server 2008R2 you have database mirroring and replication available, which will keep two databases in sync.
A schema which is efficient for OLTP is unlikely to be efficient for large volume reporting. The 'live' and 'reporting' databases should have different schema with an ETL process moving data from one to the other. I'd would like to negotiate with the business just how synchronised the reporting database needs to be. If the reports are processing large amounts of data they will take some time to run so a lag in data replication will not be noticed, I would suggest. In extremis you could construct a solution using Service Broker to move the data and processing on the reporting server to distribute it amonst the reporting tables.
The numbers you quote (20,000 inserts per second, 40 millions rows in largest table) suggests a record doesn't reside in the DB for long. You would have a significant load performing DELETEs. Optimising these out of peak hours could be sufficient to solve your problems.

handling data between remote instances

We have a hr system that holds employee data and have many remote databases that use this data. Currently we use a mixture of copying the data across periodically to the remote databases and pulling the data across using views at runtime. Im curious as to which option you think is best. My personal preference is to copy the data across periodically as it removes the dependency from the master databases. However it seems both have pros and cons
Whats the best practice for this?
Thanks
p.s we have a mixture of sql2000, 2005 and s008 servers
Part of the answer will depend on what level of latency is acceptable for the other systems that use the HR data. Is a day behind OK? an Hour? or does it need to be current?
Each instance could result in a different solution.
I prefer a data pull instead of a push. The remote decides when it needs its data and you can encapsulate all that logic on the server where it belongs. In a push, you have to keep processes on the HR server in synch with the demands of the subsystem.
I have reservations about multiple remote databases querying a source system directly. If some latency is not an issue, build a process on the HR system to snapshot the required data into some local tables (or a data warehouse?) and have all remotes query this data. At the very least, build local views against the HR source and only allow remote servers rights to those.
Are you doing this across a linked server? If so, I recommend creating synonyms on the remote that point to the HR source across the link. This will allow you to move source data locations around and only have to change your synonym definition.