SAP Business Data Could (BDC)

On Feb 13th 2024 SAP hold an event (SAP Business Unleashed) where a new software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution in area of data management called SAP Business Data Could (BDC) was announced. The solution is marketed as an evolution of SAP capabilities of planning and analytics solutions like SAP Datasphere, SAP Analytics Cloud, and SAP Business Warehouse. All these are unified with Databricks’s capabilities of data engineering and machine learning/AI.

What is Databricks? It is a data lakehouse (portmanteau of "data warehouse" and "data lake") solution that unifies data warehouses and data lakes on one platform. By handling data, analytics, and AI workloads.

By mixing of SAP data management portfolio with Databricks customers get:

- Unified Data & Analytics to combine SAP & non-SAP data

- Scalability & Performance with Apache Spark and serverless

- Delta Sharing for data access across platforms, clouds and regions

- Robust AI & Machine Learning Tool Set

 

With this new announcement does it mean that SAP Datasphere is dead?

With Databricks now deeply integrated into SAP, does SAP Datasphere still have a role, or is it redundant? Business Data Cloud is rather the next iteration of DataSphere. However, it can turn out that some features will not be build in the Datasphere but rather in Databricks. Thus, for some use cases the Datasphere may become obsolete.

 

Release of SAP Business Data Cloud:

Version 1.0 General  1.0     Feb 13, 2025

 

More information:

Press release

Press release 2

BDC landing page

BDC product tour

Online docu

Databricks announcement

Databricks paper - Lakehouse: A New Generation of Open Platforms that Unify

Data Warehousing and Advanced Analytics

BW transport issue: object locked despite transport is released

Recently I saw a situation where object was not able to be included into the transport. System was indicating that the objects is locked via pop-up message (TK117):

Object XXX locked for request/task <SID>Kxxxxxx

Choose ‘Display object’ or ‘Cancel’.

However, the object was not locked by any transport neither task. The transport that the error mentioned was released and moved across the landscape long time ago.

To solve this issue, I went to t-code SE03 then in menu Requests/Tasks -> Unlock Objects (expert tool) and via this I was able to unlock object.

Notice that 1^st option – Unlock Object List needs to be selected. Transport Request/Task input field needs to be populated with the task no of the Transport Request in which the error message indicates that it is locked in.

 

Behinds the scenes what this t-code is doing is to remove a lock entry from table TLOCK (Change and Transport System: Lock Table). The table basically holds all the objects that are locked in the TRs. In my case for some reason while I released the TR the lock entry wasn’t removed from the table. And it is not known to me what was that reason…

 

Doing further research about the error I found also SAP Note 2537981 - SE13 | TK117 | Request lock on nonexistent task/request, rep ZSLA_DELETE_ORPHANED_TLOCK_2. The Note describes how to removed the lock entry (so called orphaned lock) for LIMU TABT objects.