Hi Guys,
I am PI developer who is currently learning about HANA and its associated tools. Naturally I am especially interested in the integration part.
My current understanding is that we have the following possibilities to load data into a HANA box (please correct me if I got something wrong or forgot a major technology):
a) Flat files
b) SLT replication
c) DXC connection
d) Data Services
e) JDBC connection
Additionally it is natively possible to execute insert and update operations on HANA using ODATA / REST services.
From what I understand, Data Services (DS) is an ETL tool used for integration and data mappings, so some tasks are similar to what PI typically does. At the same time DS seems to have only some very specific connection options. From experience I know that there are all kinds of integration needs, including scenarios where data from various sources and protocols needs to be loaded into a DB directly (e.g. the data could be coming from SOAP calls, IDOCs, RFCs, etc.)
Now my question is: Can such integration needs be covered by DS as well or which tool would be the appropriate one in this case? (Also keeping in mind that sometimes rather complex mappings are required in order to make the source data fit to the table structures)
I could have imagined something like a PI adapter towards DS, so that PI takes care of the connectivity part for "exoctic" protocols and provides a first data clean up plus a DS readable format. But from what I see PI is out of the game when HANA is concerned, even the JDBC connection is currently not supported by SAP.