SAP Data Ingestion using Fivetran and Databricks

Enterprises across industries rely on SAP for critical business operations - whether it's managing supply chains, finances, or procurement. However, leveraging this data for advanced analytics, AI, or real-time dashboards can be challenging due to the complexity of SAP's data structures.

That’s where modern data platforms like Databricks combined with ingestion tools like Fivetran come into play. Together, they offer a streamlined, scalable, and low-maintenance approach to ingest SAP data and unlock its value.

SAP systems (like SAP ECC or SAP S/4HANA) are not built for modern analytics or machine learning workloads. Traditional methods of extracting SAP data involve few challenges.

The Challenges

• Heavy ETL pipelines with ABAP programs
• Custom data integrations and point-to-point systems
• Significant maintenance overhead
• Limited extraction time window with other ETL approaches.
• No Real-Time
• Source deletions cannot be replicated

Architecture Overview

To overcome these challenges, Fivetran can be used along with databricks to deliver great value.

If Databricks is used as the foundation for all the data workloads, Fivetran can act as the bridge between nearly 700 data sources and the Databricks platform, ensuring fully automated, reliable and secure data movement as well as change data capture and schema management. Data that Fivetran moves is always a faithful representation of the data source and is high quality, trusted, organized, understandable and ready for all Databricks workloads.

The Databricks Benefits

Databricks, with its unified lakehouse architecture, allows organizations to run scalable analytics, machine learning, and BI on a single platform. But to do that effectively, you need your SAP data available in Databricks—accurate, timely, and structured.

• Scalability for large SAP datasets
• Seamless integration with Fivetran
• Delta Lake for ACID reliability
• Real time and Near real-time analytics
• Cost efficient storage and compute
• Secure and governed access to SAP data
• Frameworks like Optimize, Z-Order, Vacuum and Merge
• Unified Data Governance and Data Lineage
• Fully ready for Gen AI and LLM's

The Fivetran's Benefits

Fivetran is a fully managed data pipeline tool that automates data extraction from a wide variety of sources—including SAP—into cloud destinations like Databricks. It supports near real-time replication and handles schema drift automatically, making data ingestion more resilient and hands-off.

• Automated connectors for SAP ECC and SAP S/4HANA
• Minimal setup with pre-built schemas
• Change Data Capture (CDC) for efficiency
• Zero-maintenance pipeline management
• Fivetran supports Databricks All-purpose cluster and SQL Warehouse
• Fivetran provides compare and repair feature
• MERGE is used to avoid duplicates
• Fivetran supports Databricks Unity Catalog
• Latency can decrease in multi-region environment

Best Practices

• Use Fivetran transformations to normalize SAP field names or apply business logic.
• Set up data quality checks in Databricks using tools like Delta Live Tables.
• Leverage Unity Catalog (on Databricks) to manage access control, governance, and lineage of SAP data.

Final Thoughts

By combining Fivetran’s automated pipelines with Databricks’ powerful compute and analytics capabilities, enterprises can gain real-time insights from SAP systems without extensive engineering work.

• Fivetran and Lakehouse have proven to be an efficient solution to extract data from SAP
• 60% Cost saving can be achieved using Spark Streaming
• Automate-First approach to properly handle the amount of data sources
• Close collaboration with business to deliver data at the expected velocity