Using #SQLServer 2014 Integration Services (#SSIS) with #SAPHANA – Part 1

Now that SAP has awarded me SAP HANA Distinguished Engineer status, it’s time to get some new content out to the community. Over the last year, I’ve been working with Microsoft to see what works and what doesn’t work when using SQL Server 2014 Integration Services (SSIS) with SAP HANA. After all, SAP HANA supports ODBC connections and starting with SPS 9, developers can use the SAP HANA Data Provider for Microsoft ADO.NET. For customers using SQL Server as their data platform for SAP Business Suite / NetWeaver solutions, SSIS is part of your licensed version of SQL Server. So why pay for an additional Enterprise Information Management system, when just about everything you need is with your SQL Server license? Check out the “Enterprise Information Management using SSIS, MDS, and DQS Together [Tutorial]”. Along the way, I’ve learned what worked well and what you might want to avoid when using SSIS with SAP HANA.

In this blog series, I’ll share my experiences over the last year using a video blog with videos hosted on YouTube. While they may not the quality of the SAP HANA Academy YouTube videos in terms of production, they won’t have any marketing spin – this is developer to developer. Here is what you can expect in the series.

1. Getting started with a free trial of Microsoft Azure. I’ll use Microsoft Azure’s 30 day free trial to create a client virtual for the tools. This means I have to complete this entire blog series within in 30 days. This is the topic for this blog post.
2. Creating a virtual machine with SQL Server 2014 and the Visual Studio Data Tools.
3. Creating your first SSIS solution to import a flat file into SAP HANA.
4. Best practices in security when creating SSIS packages.
5. Copying data from a SQL Server database into an SAP HANA star-schema.
6. Using SQL Server change data capture to incrementally update fact and dimension tables on SAP HANA.
7. Copying data from SAP HANA into a SQL Server database.
8. Using SSIS to extract data from SAP Business Suite into SAP HANA.
9. Using SSIS to load data files in parallel to improve data loading performance.
10. Trade-offs in using ODBC versus the SAP HANA Data Provider for Microsoft ADO.NET when loading text files.
11. Using SQL Server Agent to run SSIS jobs.
12. How to monitor SSIS job execution.
13. How to do error handling during a connection failure to SAP HANA.
14. How to do SSIS logging to debug issues and audit packages.

I’ll try to keep the videos to five minutes in length thru creative editing out of long running operations. I’ll let you know when I edit out large chunks and let you know how long the operation really took.

Without further ado, here is the first video on the series.

Please let me know if you like this approach with the videos (with your ratings of course ). If there is a particular topic you would like to see sooner, let me know.I hope you enjoy the series.

Regards,
Bill Ramos, SAP HANA Distinguished Engineer

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