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:

1. Use Alation Rala to extract metadata from SAP ECC and export it to JSON files.

2. Use the OCF Connector for SAP ECC to extract metadata from the source JSON files.

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 the LogicalName 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	Azure Storage Azure Storage account name Azure Storage key Windows SMB SMB file share user SMB file share password AWS S3 User access key ID User secret access key	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 assetType field value is extracted as source comments.	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.