SAP ECC OCF Connector: Overview¶
The OCF Connector for SAP ECC was developed by Alation and is available as a Zip file that can be uploaded and installed in the Alation application. The connector is compiled together with the required database driver and no additional effort is needed to procure and install the driver.
Extraction from an SAP ECC data source requires the use of a separate tool—Alation Rala.
Note
Create a ticket with Alation Support about receiving the SAP ECC connector package and Alation Rala installer and documentation.
Cataloging an SAP ECC data source in Alation includes two stages:
The exported JSON files that you want ingested into the Alation catalog need to be placed onto a supported storage system. The connector can work with three storage systems:
AWS S3
Azure Storage
Windows SMB file share.
The connector can be used on both Alation on-prem and Alation Cloud Service instances. It extracts and catalogs such SAP ECC assets as:
DataAsset
TechnologyAsset
DataStructure
DataElement
System
Schema
Table
View
Column
DataAssetGroup
SapApplComp
SapPackage
The connector processes the exported asset-to-asset relationships to represent the hierarchy of SAP ECC objects in Alation as the Data Source > Schema > Table > Column hierarchy.
Note
Currently, Alation only extracts the
PhysicalName
property of SAP ECC objects. To search for SAP ECC objects in Alation, you’ll need to use physical asset names. Searching by theLogicalName
property of extracted assets is not supported yet.
Object Mapping¶
SAP ECC object
Alation object
Column asset name
Column
Object asset name
Table
DataAsset
TechnologyAsset
DataStructure
DataElement
Table
View
DataAssetGroup
Schema
Schema
Team¶
You may need the assistance of your SAP administrator and your storage system administrator to configure the use of the SAP ECC connector end to end, which involves the following activities:
Install Alation Rala in your network
Provide a database as the Alation Rala Repository
Grant the appropriate access rights for Alation Rala to connect to SAP ECC
Extract metadata from SAP ECC into Alation Rala Repository
Export metadata from Alation Rala to the JSON format
Procure storage for the exported JSON files and collect access information for Alation
Install the connector in Alation
Create and configures an SAP ECC data source in Alation
The details are available in SAP ECC OCF Connector: Install and Configure.
Scope¶
The table below describes which metadata objects are extracted by the connector and which catalog functionality is supported.
Feature |
Scope |
Availability |
---|---|---|
Authentication |
||
Depends on the storage system |
|
Yes |
SSL |
No |
|
Kerberos |
Not applicable |
No |
LDAP |
Not applicable |
No |
Metadata extraction (MDE) |
||
Default MDE (full extraction) |
Extraction of metadata from JSON exports available on a supported storage system. Selective MDE is not supported. |
Yes |
Custom query-based MDE |
Not applicable |
No |
Extracted metadata objects |
||
Data Source |
Data source object in Alation that is parent to extracted metadata |
Yes |
Schemas |
List of schemas |
Yes |
Tables |
List of tables |
Yes |
Columns |
List of columns |
Yes |
Views |
List of views |
Yes |
Source comments |
The |
Yes |
Primary keys |
Primary key information for extracted tables |
Yes |
Foreign keys |
Foreign key information for extracted tables |
Yes |
Sampling and Profiling |
No |
|
Query Log Ingestion (QLI) |
No |
|
Compose |
No |
|
Lineage |
||
Direct lineage based on MDE * |
Alation calculates lineage based on the relationship files exported from SAP ECC. The relations represent references between SAP ECC assets. Alation extracts the source asset names, target asset names, and relationship type, and builds lineage between source tables, target tables, and dataflow objects. The name of the relationship is added to the dataflow content. Lineage data is available on the Lineage tab on catalog pages of tables. |
Yes |
* The direct lineage feature is not available by default. To enable it, set the alation_conf parameter alation.ocf.mde.direct_lineage.enable_extraction
to True
. With this setting in True
, Alation will calculate the direct lineage data for your ECC data source during MDE.