After getting an overview and understanding of how Virtual Data Models (VDM) and ABAP Core Data Services (ABAP CDS Views) work in SAP S/4HANA, and the requirements needed for a CDS View to be extractable in my colleague Michael Sanjongco’s blog post Part 1 – SAP S/4HANA Cloud Data Integration to power your Intelligence Enterprise.

This blog will briefly explain the different components which play a role in exposing data from SAP S/4HANA Cloud, and the different options to connect SAP S/4HANA to target systems like SAP BW/4HANA, SAP Data Intelligence, SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, and SAP HANA to be able to extract data to them, and achieve your extensibility and analytics scenarios.

Figure1: SAP S/4HANA Data Integration – Architectural Overview

Explaining the extraction mechanism from a bottom-up approach as shown in the Architectural Overview (figure 1):

• Application Tables are the database tables that hold all business/configuration data. Data cannot be extracted directly from them
• Internal CDS View Models are views built on top of Application Tables and/or other CDS Views for data modeling purposes
• CDS Extraction views are the extraction-enabled CDS Views that are built on top of associations of Application Tables and/or other CDS Views, depending on what the CDS View itself is exposing. They are used for data extraction from SAP S/4HANA
• Extraction runtime is the middleware between the CDS Views and target systems. It contains different engines like Operational Data Provisioning (ODP)/Operational Delta Queue (ODQ), Change Data Capture (CDC), and Reconstruction. They are responsible to convert, expose and transfer the data to the respective API which the target system can communicate with; those are reflected both in the communication scenarios configured in SAP S/4HANA Cloud, and the respective connection type/configuration on the target system as it will be explained in detail in the next blogs

The table below shows the different integration scenarios, their corresponding communication scenario(s), connection types, best practices to guide you on how to set up the integration scenario, and documentation of different applications that can be used in target systems to extract SAP S/4HANA Cloud Data from:

SAP Data Intelligence & SAP Data Warehouse Cloud provide you with the ability to preview the data exposed using CDS Views before extracting them. You can use the Metadata Explorer application in SAP Data Intelligence to preview and analyze the data and its metadata, and Data Flows and Remote Tables data preview functionality respectively in SAP Data Warehouse cloud.