SAP Data Warehouse Cloud is a brand-new Data Warehousing solution on the cloud by SAP that can unite all your data sources in one central Data Store and maintain security, trust, and semantic richness of your information.

The scope of this blog covers the creation of the Entity-Relationship Model using the Data Builder capabilities of SAP Data Warehouse Cloud. You can register for the trial access here.

An Entity-Relationship Model is the visual representation of data that helps business users in understanding the relationship between Tables and Views as well as the dependencies between them.

Build the Entity-Relationship Model by Creating Tables On-The-Fly using JSON file.

1. In the Home page of SAP Data Warehouse Cloud Platform, click on the ‘Data Builder’ icon in the left panel.

2. The available Spaces will be displayed. Click on the Space where the Entity-Relationship Model needs to be created. In this case, Space ‘HANA’ is selected.

3. Click on the option ‘New Entity-Relationship Model’.

4. Click on the ‘Import’ icon and then select ‘Import from CSN file’.

5. ‘Browse’ the JSON file to be imported and click ‘Next’. The JSON file basically has the definition of Tables (Entities) along with the association described between the entities.

6. Select the highlighted checkbox and click ‘Import’ which will create Local Tables in the Space ‘HANA’, corresponding to each of the Table definition in the JSON file.

7. You can now see the canvas which displays the relationship of the entities as defined in the JSON file in the form of the Entity-Relationship model.

8. If you click on the arrow between the entities ‘PurchaseOrders’ and ‘Products’, the Association Properties opens on the right where you could see that the entities ‘PurchaseOrders’ and ‘Products’ are related based on the column Product ID.

9. Click on the ‘Save’ icon which will prompt you to enter Business Name and Technical Name of the model. Click ‘Save’ once you are done and ‘Deploy’.

10. Upon saving the model, a local table is created in the Space ‘HANA’ for each of the tables defined in the JSON file. Data can be imported from CSV files into these tables as instructed in this blog.

Additionally, we can use other tables/views from HANA connections, ABAP and OData Sources in building the Entity-Relationship Model.

An interesting point to be noted here is that the Entity-Relationship Models cannot be consumed in Stories where it is solely built to understand how different entities from multiple sources are related to one another to provide meaningful business insights.

The additional features in the Entity-Relationship Model will be explained in the upcoming blogs. For more details on the product please visit this link.