DataProvisioning Agent Installation and Upgrade

If you want to work on SAP Cloud platform, then you need to understand the changes and
how this products are integrated with each other and function dependent.
In short: The SAP Business Technology Platform was first released as SAP NetWeaver Cloud
in 2012, then changed to SAP HANA Cloud in 2013, then changed to SAP Cloud Platform in
2017, and finally changed to SAP Business Technology Platform in 2020.
In my past 2 shared post about SAC and CC upgrade as I mentioned while performing the
S4HANA 2020 Version upgrade for one of my customer Cloud Connector Upgrade + SAC
upgrade + DP Agent upgrade + DataServices are dependent for upgrade, before planning
you also needs to check the dependencies what integration you have in your customer
landscape which required for upgrade or supported.
SAP Cloud Products Architecture – How it’s make connection to public and remote.

Understand time to time changes in SAP products and how it interwork with each other one
difference is highlighted below.
Share soon for understanding of what is SAP Cloud in one document with all SAP products,
with why and How SAP BTP integrated more with SAP business.
Our focus now in the document is DataProvisioning Agent Installation and Upgrade and
Adapter configuration How it work and where it place in SAP Cloud integration.
DPA:To enable connections to on-premise sources, SAP Data Warehouse Cloud leverages SAP HANA
Smart Data Integration (SDI) and its Data Provisioning Agent. The DP Agent functions as a gateway to
SAP Data Warehouse Cloud. SDI configuration consists of installing an agent (A DP Agent) and an
adapter which will establish a link between sap hana and the external source. A dedicated SDI
Administrator user manages SDI landscape environments. He will be responsible for remote sources,
packages, and developer user privileges installations

SAP HANA Smart Data Integration:

 Sap Hana SDI can be described as a bridge between sap hana and external data sources. Among
other features, it would also be used as a tool to produce report from external data and to migrate
external data to sap hana. When links are established you can replicate external data to the sap
hana database environment. External data Source can be either files or links to external databases
such as Oracle. With SDI you have the ability to reshape data before producing any report or before
integrating it into the sap hana database itself.

SDI is HANA database native technology to support all styles of data integration. It can be used
for data federation (Smart Data Access), real-time data replication and to apply complex
transformations on the data.SDI is available on SAP Cloud Platform and every HANA database
since HANA SPS09.

SDI Components:

SDI has two main components. They are

1. The Data Provisioning Server (DPServer)
2. The Data Provisioning Agent (DPAgent)

1. Data Provisioning Server (DPServer):

DPServer is natively available in the HANA database. We need to activate the DPServer in the
HANA configuration.
2. Data Provisioning Agent (DP Agent):
The Data Provisioning Agent manages all SDI Adapters and connections to HANA database. It
acts as the communication interface between HANA and the Adapter. The DP Agent version
must match with the HANA version.

On this agent,different types of adapters are deployed, these adapters will take care of the
communication between the HANA database and the source systems.

SAP HANA SDI Adapters

The SDI agent includes many adapters out-of-the-box. Some of these are real-time enabled, others can
only do batch extraction. In addition to the out-of-the-box adapters, there’s also a JAVA based adapter
SDK available, which can be used to create custom adapters.Below is a list of available adapters, based
on HANA SPS11 (latest HANA release available on SCP). This list is not exhaustive and will keep
growing with every release, both with built-in adapters as with adapters delivered through the partner
ecosystem.

Real-time enabled adapters:

 SAP ECC based on Oracle, DB2, SQL Server or ASE

 SAP (Sybase) ASE
 SAP HANA
 IBM DB2
 Microsoft SQL Server
 Oracle
 Teradata
 Twitter

Batch adapters:
 ABAP adapter
 Microsoft Excel
 File (delimited and fixed width)
 Facebook
 Hadoop Hive
 Odata

User Interface
As stated earlier, SDI is fully integrated in HANA, so also the user interfaces are the standard
HANA design tools. This is primarily the HANA Web IDE where you can create the SDI objects
like remote sources, virtual tables, flowgraphs, replication tasks etc. But also HANA Studio (with
the SCP plugin) can be used to create SDI objects.

Licensing
The licensing model is always subject to change, so please check with your SAP account team
for the latest status. However in general we can say that SDI licenses are included in in the “HCP,
integration service premium edition” licenses. You will always need HANA on SCP as a pre-
requisite, the license will enable you to download the data provisioning agent and deployment
unit.
Trial access for SDI is also available today on hanatrial.ondemand.com. At the end of this blog
there’s a link to the step-by-step instructions to start using this trial.

How to install and configure Data Provisioning Agent and Register Adapters
The DP Agent can be downloaded from SAP Service Marketplace as SAR file.
1. Search for Smart Data Integration in SAP Service Marketplace.
2. From the results list, select the latest available SAP HANA SDI release (maintenance product).
Example: SAP HANA SDI 2.0
3. Select the button Comprised software component version.
4. Select HANA DP AGENT x.x
5. Download the latest Service pack.
6. After you download the right DP Agent you must install it.

7. Click on Register Agent and give the Agent Name.

8. Click on Connect to HANA – Provide your HANA System Details.
9. After entering the HANA details, the DPAgent Configuration Tool should show that it is
connected to Hana successfully. We can see the agent name is registered, and the agent status
started.
10. Select ABAPAdapter and click on Register Adapter.

ABAPAdapter:

The SDI agent includes many adapters. It includes real-time enabled and batch extraction
adapters. In addition to these adapters, to create custom adapters a JAVA based adapter SDK is
also available.

This ABAPAdapter retrieves data from virtual tables through RFC for ABAP table and ODP
extractors. It also provides Real-Time change data capture for ODP extractors.

11. Once the ABAPAdapter is registered in DP Agent, we can check in HANA under SYS
Schema->Expand VIEWS->Right click on ADAPTER and select data preview to check whether
an entry is created.
Steps to set up the Remote Source:

The first step of accessing data virtually is to create remote data source in SAP HANA. Let’s see
how to create remote data source in SAP HANA Studio.

1. Create remote data source by open the folder called “Provisioning” in HANA.
2. Then right click on the “Remote Sources”, select “New Remote Source…”.

3. Create the new remote source by maintaining the following fields:

 Source Name: Give a proper Name.
 Adapter Name: Choose the relevant adapter for SDI – in this case ABAPAdapter.
 Source Location: Select the data provisioning agent installed in the previous steps.
  Fill in the right Credentials to use the S/4HANA source tables.

4. Choose one adapter from the adapter list in the popup dialog and select the source location,
fill in corresponding connection and authentication information of the remote data source.

5. After filling the connection information, press the run button to create remore data source.
Now, we can see the newly created remote source connection under Provisioning folder.

Steps to Create Virtual Table:

After the Remote data source is created in SAP HANA Studio, we need to map the tables in
remote data source as “Virtual Table” to our schema.
Let’s take Sales Document Header and Item tables (VBAK and VBAP) as an example.
1. Create Virtual Table.
2. Right click on the table in Remote Source, Select Add as Virtual Table.

3. Select your Schema.

4. Execute a quick smoke test and get a preview of VBAK data by running the following SQL
statement in the console.
5. Repeat the steps for all the Virtual Tables based on the individual Requirements. In this
example we’d like to use two tables (VBAK & VBAP) from the Source (S/4HANA) as Virtual
tables.
6. Click on create.

Conclusion:
Now the Source Tables are connected via SDI, the Data Provisioning Agent is installed, and the
Data Provisioning Adapter is deployed. Furthermore, the Remote Source and the related Virtual
Tables are created.
Refer : SAP Data Warehouse Cloud DP Agent Setup, Configuration
and Troubleshooting Guide

DP Agent upgrade process:

1. Download the DP Agent Software from SAP Market Place

2. Login with dpagent user

3. Login with dpagent user
4. Got to path /usr/sap/dataprovagent/bin

5. Check dpagent process is running

6. Check the current version of dpagent

7. Extract the dpagent IMDB.ZIP* file in any location
8. You can see HANA_DP_AGENT_20_LIN_X86_64 dir created

9. Open the new Dir HANA_DP_AGENT_20_LIN_X86_64 dir created and see below files

10. STOP dpagent ./dpagent_servicedeamon.sh

11. Now you can see dpagent process id not exist

12. Take the backup of dataprovagent before installing

13. Execute ./hdbinst

14. Check the log file of dpagent

It says success
15. Upgrade successfully completed
16. Check the version in manifest file

17. Start the dpagent ---- ./dpagent_servicedeamon.sh

References:
Setting-up the Data Provisioning Agent to Connect SAP HANA On-premise to SAP HANA
Cloud
Data & Analytics Solutions in the Cloudn powered by SAP HANA - Learning Track
Visit below for more understanding - https://saphanajourney.com/

SAP Notes for Data Provisioning Agent and support component

2511196 - What ports are used by Smart Data Integration

2091095 - SAP HANA Smart Data Integration and SAP HANA Smart Data Quality
2400022 - FAQ: SAP HANA Smart Data Integration (SDI)
2477204 - FAQ: SAP HANA Services and Ports
Support Component for SDI HAN-DP-SD

Thank You.
Jasbir Khanuja, Never Stop Learning Never Stop Exploring