Powering Modern Data Warehouses with Semantic SAP Data
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Key Takeaways
⇨ Onibex One Connect streamlines the movement of SAP data into modern analytics platforms like Snowflake and Databricks, transforming traditional ETL processes into efficient, real-time integrations while preserving semantic context.
⇨ The solution utilizes intuitive data modeling and semantic enrichment to ensure technical jargon from SAP is translated into meaningful business terms, enabling accurate analytics and enhanced AI interactions.
⇨ With capabilities for both real-time and batch data processing, One Connect simplifies the integration process, reducing complexity and accelerating time-to-value for organizations looking to modernize their data warehousing strategy.
SAP systems are the operational heart of many enterprises, holding invaluable data across procurement, sales, inventory, production, and more. However, unlocking this data for modern analytics platforms like Snowflake and Databricks often feels like navigating a complex labyrinth.
Traditional ETL processes can be cumbersome and slow and often lose critical context. How can organizations efficiently bridge the gap and truly modernize their data warehouse strategy in this scenario?
The answer lies with Onibex One Connect, an end-to-end solution that streamlines the movement of SAP data into platforms like Snowflake and Databricks. It lays a robust foundation for data warehouse modernization and enables powerful AI capabilities.
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More Than Just Moving Bits and Bytes
Moving data from SAP isn’t merely about copying tables. The real challenge lies in preserving that data’s meaning or semantics. SAP’s technical field names (like KUNNR for Customer Number or MATNR for Material Number) are cryptic to downstream systems and, crucially, to the AI models we increasingly rely on.
Without understanding that KUNNR means “Customer Number,” how can an AI answer a natural language query like “Show me sales trends for our top customers?” It can’t. In these cases, simply dumping raw SAP tables into a data lake leaves analysts and AI tools clueless, requiring extensive manual mapping and transformation efforts.
Delivering Data and Context
One Connect reads SAP’s metadata and doesn’t just move the data; it translates the technical jargon into meaningful business terms, embedding the crucial semantic context.
Here’s how it empowers integration technicians:
- Intuitive Data Modeling: One Connect features a graphical SAP Data Modeler. Using drag-and-drop functionality, users can visually design SAP entities like Sales Orders, Invoices, Customers, or Materials. Moreover, it comes with prepackaged entities, allowing users to rapidly model common SAP objects with their underlying tables, fields, and joins already defined.
- Semantic Preservation: As data flows, One Connect ensures that the cryptic KUNNR arrives in Snowflake or Databricks not just as data but tagged with its meaning – “Customer Number,” along with correct data types and descriptions. This semantic enrichment is vital for enabling accurate analytics and meaningful AI interactions.
- Structured Data Layers: One Connect automatically structures the ingested SAP data into standardized Bronze (raw) and Silver (cleansed, integrated) layers within the target data warehouse like Snowflake or Databricks. It even provides templates for Gold layers (business-ready aggregates) across areas like Sales, Production, Procurement, and Inventory, accelerating the time-to-value for business users.
- Real-Time & Batch Capabilities: One Connect handles bulk and continuous loads seamlessly for real-time updates triggered by SAP events, such as saving a new invoice by activating the real-time events in SAP and the data flows.
Chatting with Your SAP Data
What if users could simply ask their data questions in plain English instead of needing specialized skills in Power BI or Tableau to build dashboards for every ad-hoc query?
With the semantically rich data provided by One Connect populating the Databricks environment, tools like Databricks’ Genie AI come alive. A user can ask, “Could you create a graphic of the materials used in 2024 invoices?”—and the AI, understanding the context provided by One Connect, generates the relevant visualization immediately.
Crucially, this interaction happens within a secure environment. The data isn’t sent to public AI models but remains within the organization’s private cloud or virtual network, ensuring enterprise-grade security for sensitive SAP information.
Onibex also offers a free Proof of Concept (POC), during which an organization can move and even chat with its SAP data in Snowflake or Databricks within 10 working hours.
What This Means for SAPinsiders
Onibex One Connect offers a practical, efficient path to leverage SAP data in modern cloud data warehouses. It tackles the core challenges of semantic understanding, complex modeling, and real-time integration. For integration technicians, this means faster project delivery, reduced complexity, and the ability to enable powerful, AI-driven insights directly from core business data.
Stop wrestling with complex SAP structures and cryptic field names. One Connect easily moves vital SAP data into modern platforms like Databricks or Snowflake, preserving its business meaning. It translates SAP fields, making the data instantly understandable and ready for combining with other sources for richer reporting, deeper analysis, and cross-functional insights without needing deep SAP technical knowledge.
Accelerate the journey to a modern cloud data warehouse on Snowflake or Databricks. One Connect’s prepackaged content, graphical modeling, and ability to handle both initial loads and real-time data streams from SAP mean faster implementation and quicker time-to-value. Gain near real-time visibility into business events in SAP directly within the organization’s analytics platform, enabling more agile and informed decision-making based on the freshest data available.
