HANA Live views vs. CDS views

[Former Member]

Hi,

I hope someone will share their thoughts on this topic.

The first and second edition of the simple finance used HANA Live content as their "connectors" to the HANA database. These views were easily reachable through the HANA live explorer, Lumira and Analysis for office as well as various connectors on the BO platform.

However these views also came with a disadvantage of being native HANA views and therefore needed to be handled on the HANA database to be transported if you generated new views.

The CDS views are created via the netweaver application layer and therefore handled in a transport request, which then creates the native HANA view on the DB. However so far i haven't been able to use a generated CDS view in Lumira, HANA live explorer etc.

My dilemma comes with the ownership of the datamodels. In my mind (sorry if i anger some people here ) the best people to generate views and know the datamodels of the ECC system would be the developers. Therefore the developers should create the views needed for data extraction to be used both in ABAP programming as well as the various BI tools. However when there isn't one coherent way of creating these views, what should we do?

The CDS views comes with clear advantages, but can't be used easily for reporting out of HANA, meaning that we would need a BW system for the reporting then.

We are trying to achieve a one source of truth here, so we should only need to create one view, that can be used in all scenarios, but to my knowledge this isn't achievable right now.

Please share your thoughts and if you know how to use a CDS generated view in Lumira / HANA Live explorer, please let me know.

Also if SAP could share some thoughts of the future aspects of the HANA Live views, that would be beneficial to all. I see that the help.sap.com page for HBA hasn't been updated since April 2015.

[Former Member]

Hi Jakob,

if you have a look at the document linked to Dmitry's post (SAP S/4HANA Analytics & SAP BW Data Integration) http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-68337

it looks fairly clear that HANA Live is a solution for Business Suite but CDS views will be the future and baseline for S/4HANA reporting and will also serve as the basis for it's extractors to BW. When I read this document (slides 10 and 11) I understand that the CDS views will become readily available to BI reporting interfaces via Bex Query designer as a transient provider. (The same way we used SAP InfoSets to access SAP data via BI tools). As Lumira can access Bex Queries, you shouldn't have a problem getting at your CDS view.

Sandy

[BAJAJ-DXC]

or SAP can provide us some pre-built / standard Universes built on S4-CDS views, and these universes further will be used at BO or Lumira level.

[dmitry_kuznetsov1]

Jakob,

I share the same questions with you and wonder what the future looks like. For now there are varying statements coming from SAP which do not give a clear direction.

This post has some information (including comments)

but still a lot of grey areas... If you find out more, I will be glad to hear that, too.

Cheers,

Dmitry