Using Smart Data Access SDA in SAP HANA

Smart Data Access under Provisioning tab allows you to access and analyze the data stored in other database systems without replicating the data into HANA database. Data replication process is always time consuming and requires memory storage. Smart Data Access allows you to create virtual tables which are linked to remote system tables and data can be directly accessed in SAP HANA system with these virtual tables.

You can manipulate these virtual tables and run SQL statements- SELECT, INSERT and UPDATE and even Join is permissible between virtual and local tables. When a JOIN is applied on virtual tables, SAP HANA Optimizer sends the operation to remote data source and results are sent back to HANA system.

Smart Data Access was first introduced in SAP HANA SPS06 and it allowed only READ operation on the remote system tables. The remote system supported in SAP HANA SPS06 with Smart Data Access includes: Sybase ASE, Sybase IQ, Teradata and Apache Hadoop.