4/26/2018 SDI vs BODS vs SLT - A Comparison [Part 1] by Visual BI Solutions

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BODS vs SLT vs SDI – A Comparison [Part 1]

by Venkatasanjai Parasaram Muni | Jan 11, 2018 | Business Intelligence, Data Science

Customers always wonder which data provisioning tool (among BODS, SLT and SDI) is best suited for transporting data
between various systems, especially when there is a need for real time replication. In this blog series, we will be looking at
various features and business scenarios and which of the data provisioning tools from SAP best ts in.
 

BODS vs. SLT vs. SDI – A Comparison

 
To start with, let us compare the SAP Data Services (BODS), SAP Landscape Transformation (SLT) and SAP HANA Smart
Data Integration (SDI) from the following perspectives:

1. Data Replication
2. Data Transformation
3. Data Sources
4. Data Targets
5. Change Data Capture (CDC)
6. Data Quality
7. Predictive Analytics
8. Scheduling

A summary of the analysis is shown herewith, followed by more details below.

 

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1. Data Replication
 
Data replication is a basic feature that is expected from all data provisioning tools. SAP BODS, a complete ETL tool,
supports data replication in batch mode, but real-time replication is limited to web services. On the other hand, SLT and
SDI have the capability to do near-real-time data replication with SDI having an option to execute even in batch mode.
Note that real-time replication with SDI is not applicable for all data sources.
 

2. Data Transformation
 
When it comes to transforming, cleaning and integrating data, SAP BODS wins hands down as it o ers a wide variety of
data integration and data quality transform options. Nevertheless, SDI comes second with almost equal number of
transform options available to integrate and cleanse data. While the tool as such has a long way to go, it may acquire
new transform options with each release. SLT, on the other hand, has very minimal transformation options that can be
done only through ABAP. In other words, SLT is more suited for data replication than transformation.
 

3. Sources
 
The best use case scenario for SLT has always been connecting from SAP ECC to HANA in a side car implementation. This
does not mean that SLT can only be used for SAP source systems. It can also be used for a quite a few non-SAP systems
like Oracle, DB2 etc. SAP BODS can connect to a variety of legacy systems (Like IBM, AS400) along with the traditional
RDBMS as the source. SDI, with the help of SDA (smart data access adapters), can connect to a lot of traditional RDBMS
and unstructured data sources like Twitter, Facebook etc. SDI can also integrate well with Big Data software like Hadoop
through HDFS system. Big Data integration is now available with BODS and it can connect to HDFS.
 

4. Targets
 
SAP BODS can load data into various target systems including at les. Even though the most preferred scenario for SLT
is loading into SAP HANA, it can still be used to load data into other RDBMS targets. With SDI being available as part of
SAP HANA, it can have only HANA database (including cloud) as its target.
 

5. Change Data Capture (CDC)

 
With any data warehouse implementation, maintaining history of the data is the key business requirement along with the
need for data analysis, but at the same time we do not need to bring the entire source data into the target every day.
This is where the concept of CDC is used to determine or track the changed data and perform actions on the same. It
allows systems to bring only the latest changes on the data (after any insert, update or delete is triggered on the table)
after the initial load. With SLT you can perform CDC by using Replication option, but it does not maintain history in your

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target. Both BODS and SDI can connect to a lot of CDC enabled sources and can later use the same data to perform SCD
(Slow Changing Dimension)/Transaction maintenance on the target data.

Not that not all ll data sources have the CDC option enabled.
 

6. Data Quality
 
Data Quality is essential for insightful analysis on data. Data quality transforms are available with both BODS and SDI
and comes with a separate licensing cost. SLT does not have the data quality option.
 

7. Predictive Analytics
 
The recent development in the eld of BI is to predict outcomes based on the di erent patterns on data using custom
machine learning algorithms. SDI, being a latest technology in the eld of Enterprise Information Management, gives the
exibility to apply machine learning algorithms along with integration and cleansing techniques at the same time.

Both BODS and SLT do not have predictive capabilities.

 

8. Scheduling
 
All the three SAP o erings discussed here have the ability to schedule and monitor jobs. BODS has an event based
triggering through which dependency on the jobs can be set with respect to other jobs. SLT tasks can also be scheduled
through LTR con guration in SLT server. Similarly, in SDI owtasks can be scheduled.

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