Real-Time and Near Real-Time Streaming using SAP ESP, SAP HANA and SAP Design Studio

Real-Time streaming in dashboards (SAP Design Studio) is now possible with the new SAP Event Stream Processor or SAP HANA Smart Data Streaming (as part of SAP HANA SPS 09) and SAP Design Studio 1.4.

I started drafting this blog with some screenshots and then I realized it is better to show it as a short video demo instead. So, I created a an overview demo on Real-Time (Push Case) and near Real-Time (Pull Case) using SAP ESP 5.1 SP9, SAP HANA SPS 09, and SAP Design Studio 1.4.

Real-Time and Near Real-Time Streaming using SAP ESP, SAP HANA and SAP Design Studio — Real-Time and Near Real-Time Streaming in SAP Design Studio

Real-Time (Push Based):

Real-time streaming of data is possible with SAP ESP, i.e. you can run and create your own complex event processing (CEP) applications from the streaming data, and with the new SAP Design studio 1.4 this data is streamed into the dashboard in Real-Time.

For this demo, I created a macro that generates random numbers every second, and this data is loaded into SAP ESP and streamed into SAP Design Studio in Real-Time.

Near Real-Time (Pull Based):

Timer component in SAP Design Studio will allow you to set an interval in milliseconds to refresh connections in Design studio application, i.e. data is pulled into the Design Studio application in regular intervals from HANA or BW.

You have two options here:

Option 1: Load the data from ESP to tables in SAP HANA and build Analytic View on these tables.
Option 2: Create a virtual table in SAP HANA using the Smart Data Access and build Analytic View on these tables.

So in this demo, data is loaded into tables in SAP HANA in real-time and the dashboard is built on top of an Analytic View. Data is refreshed every 15 secs using the Timer component.