Anyone using SAP Tables with LRAW type columns (Example: STXL)

George_Stephen

We need to bring in SAP STXL table to Aperture. This has an LRAW type column named 'Data'. This is not readable in SAP front-end also. Currently we need to bring it in the table to Oracle Database thru custom scripts in SLT Replication and then bring from Oracle Database to Aperture. Has anyone found a way to bring this data straight from SAP to Aperture?

Is the solution for this planned in future release of Aperture?

Henry Simms

Hi @George_Stephen

The SAP LRAW type becomes data type BLOB in the HANA schema. To load data from a HANA DB, Data Studio can be configured to use the JDBC driver ngdbc.jar produced by SAP. Unfortunately it does not appear that this driver loads can retrieve BLOB types.

To load BLOB data, it may be possible to create a view in HANA where the BLOB value is cast to a varchar, using a query similar to:

SELECT TOP 100 MANDT, RELID, TDOBJECT, TDNAME, TDID, TDSPRAS, SRTF2, CLUSTR, CAST(TO_VARCHAR(cast(CLUSTD as varbinary)) AS varchar) "CLUSTD as TEXT"
FROM SAPHANADB.STXL;

Does this sound like a possible solution? It would avoid the Oracle DB replication.

Josh Boxer

Thanks Henry. Adding these two relevant blog posts that discuss getting these SAP long texts into a data warehouse such as SAP HANA.

https://blogs.sap.com/2020/02/11/how-to-replicate-stxl-table-indx-like-using-sdi/

https://blogs.sap.com/2014/02/27/how-toload-sap-long-text-to-hana-using-slt/

Henry Simms

Thanks Josh

Reading the above, I now understand that the long raw values in ECC inside tables like STXL are compressed / binary representation of characters, but won't be subject to character set conversion etc. They need to be extracted correctly before being replicated to HANA, so if that hasn't happened the HANA BLOB may not contain any useful information:

It would be useful to know how STXL has been replicated to HANA DB, and what data types the HANA table are. See also https://blogs.sap.com/2020/02/11/how-to-replicate-stxl-table-indx-like-using-sdi/