Character setting

[mbernsteiner]

I try to extract data from an SAP ERP System using SAP Data Services having the West European Codepage (e.g.Table KNA1) - within the data there are several special characters like ß, ö, ä,... and so on - when loading into a Template Table on SAP HANA.

The issue i have now is that those special characters take more space than a column in VARCHAR can store - so there is an option in Data Services to "take" NVARCHAR instead of VARCHAR - that is working but it changes the "Table" in Target related to the Source Table definition (SOURCE: VARCHAR - TARGET: NVARCHAR...).

I know that also from ORACLE as Target Database - but there you can specify additional session parameters like "ALTER SESSION SET NLS_CHAR = 'CHAR' instead of 'BYTE' when the Database is set up with NLS_CHARACTER settings BYTE.

Is there a similar option available with SAP HANA? What i don't want to do is to "manually" change some datatype definitions of the target tables...

Thanks!

Best Regards

Martin

[lbreddemann]

Hi Martin,

in this case the best option is likely to perform a unicode conversion during the extraction and use NVARCHAR instead. Changing the columns to NVARCHAR could be done via script or by search/replace in the DDL file.

The whole NLS... character handling was invented to deal with non-unicode character sets and with SAP HANA Unicode is definitively the way to go.

- Lars

[i033659]

Comment from my side:

[...]SAP HANA Unicode is definitively the way to go.[...] would be nice but in PAL/AFM there are actually algorithms where you have to change the type of input fields nvarchar back to varchar in order to work.

Regards,

Ingo

[lbreddemann]

Yes, Peter I'm aware of this.

So what?

How does that change what I wrote before?

What is your approach on this topic?

- Lars

[mbernsteiner]

I'm wondering that this is not "Standard".... But i know that's not your fault Lars

In the meantime i'm working within Data Services with the Option "Convert VARCHAR to NVARCHAR" to get Data out of SAP ECC loaded.... I hope not that i've manually recreate the tables or adjust them

Thanks for you input!

- Martin