SAP OData Private Preview

OData (Open Data Protocol) is a standardized protocol developed by Microsoft and widely adopted by SAP for secure, scalable, and efficient data exchange across SAP systems and various other platforms, applications, or devices through HTTP. The OData protocol enables seamless integration, allowing you to use SAP data within broader ecosystems.

The Fivetran SAP OData connector integrates your SAP system as a data source with a focus on read operations. It extracts data from the SAP OData API and loads it into your destination, providing streamlined access to SAP ERP data, including:

• Core Data Services (CDS) views - Modern analytical views that provide direct access to SAP business data
• Business Warehouse (BW) extractors - Traditional data extraction objects exposed through the SAP Operational Data Provisioning (ODP) API
• Key business processes data - Critical operational data representing your organization's core workflows

The connector leverages SAP's standardized OData services for efficient data retrieval, making it easier to analyze and manipulate ERP data across diverse applications and systems.

Features

Setup guide

Follow our step-by-step SAP OData setup guide to connect SAP OData to your destination using the Fivetran connector.

Sync overview

Fivetran leverages the SAP OData API to extract data from your SAP environment. This RESTful interface provides standardized access to your SAP OData resources, including both Core Data Services (CDS) views and traditional BW extractors that have been exposed. To ensure a successful sync, all extraction objects (CDS views and BW extractors) must be correctly published to the SAP OData API and enhanced with the required SAP annotations in their definitions:

• @Analytics.dataExtraction.enabled: true - Enables data extraction. You can wrap an extractor (for example, based on a table or extractor logic) into a CDS view and annotate it for extraction.
• @Analytics.dataExtraction.delta.changeDataCapture.automatic: true - Enables automatic delta data extraction, which tracks changes (inserts, deletions, updates) for incremental data loads. This reduces the need for full data extractions during reporting or re-sync operations.

Fivetran leverages specific SAP artifacts and delta tracking mechanisms to optimize data synchronization:

• SAP artifacts (for example, FactsOf or EntityOf) define the relationships between entities within an object. These artifacts enable comprehensive and context-aware data extraction.
• DeltaLinks track incremental changes since the last sync, optimizing resource usage and ensuring only updated records are captured in each sync cycle.

Fivetran replicates the two entities into a single table in your destination, combining the artifact and delta entities to provide a comprehensive view of your SAP data. We also retrieve metadata fields to track the data extraction process (ODQ-prefixed columns). These fields are essential for incremental data extraction but are not added to the destination.

Fivetran supports loading only change data from the SAP OData API, minimizing the load on your SAP system while providing efficient access to your business data.

SAP OData metadata mapping

The SAP OData API, based on the OData protocol, uses a set of conventions for building and consuming RESTful APIs. The API is structured around the concept of services, entities, properties, and keys, which map to the following elements in your destination:

• Service corresponds to a schema
• Entity corresponds to a table
• Property corresponds to a column
• Key corresponds to the primary key (PK)

Sync limitation

Each OData service can be assigned to only one SAP user at a time. This limitation is due to SAP's delta management framework, which allows only one subscriber per service. If you need to sync data from the same service to multiple destinations, create a separate OData service for each destination.

SAP artifact naming conventions

We support extraction only from SAP artifacts that follow specific naming conventions. For successful integration, ensure your extraction objects follow these specific prefix conventions:

Type transformation mapping

Fivetran maps SAP OData data types (EDM) to Fivetran-supported types. Our system attempts to infer the types of any columns with data types that are not recognized.

The following table illustrates how Fivetran transform your SAP data types (based on the OData primitive types) into Fivetran-supported types:

Schema information

Fivetran replicates the selected OData services and their underlying entities from your SAP source to your destination. Each service corresponds to a schema, each entity maps to a table, and each property becomes a column.

Fivetran retrieves and combines data from both the primary artefact entities and their associated DeltaLinksOf entities into a single destination.

Fivetran generated columns

Fivetran adds one extra system column, _fivetran_synced, to each destination table to provide insight into sync progress and timing:

Deleting data

• Fivetran tracks deleted records for all tables.
• Tables have a _fivetran_deleted column in the destination. After each re-import, we mark any row that no longer exists in the source table as deleted in the destination.