SAP HANA and ArcGIS

You can connect to your SAP HANA data warehouse from ArcGIS to perform complex spatial analysis on a subset of your spatial data. You can also publish subsets of data to ArcGIS for Server as editable feature services. These feature services can be added to client applications used by editors to update the data.

Note:

The ability to publish editable feature services containing SAP HANA data is new in ArcGIS 10.3.1.

Spatial data is stored in the SAP HANA ST_Geometry type, which is included in the default SAP HANA data warehouse installation. To use ArcGIS with SAP HANA, install and configure the SAP HANA ODBC driver on the ArcGIS client machines that will connect to an SAP HANA database. See the SAP HANA Data Warehouse Appliance requirements for ArcGIS for a list of supported SAP HANA data warehouse and ODBC driver versions.

Keep the following information in mind:

• SAP HANA uses columnar data storage, which behaves as its own index. Therefore, the spatial columns in SAP HANA tables do not require a spatial index for query performance.
• Since SAP HANA does not utilize user-defined indexes, you do not manage or rebuild indexes on tables in SAP HANA.
• SAP HANA ST_Geometry supports two-dimensional spatial data; therefore, you cannot paste or import spatial data containing z- or m-coordinates into SAP HANA.

Use data subsets

In most cases, you store large amounts of data in SAP HANA. To perform analyses from ArcGIS or publish data, use a subset of data. How you do this depends on what you want to do with the data.

• If you are adding data to ArcMap for viewing and analysis within the map, add a query layer and define the query layer expression to return only a subset of the data.
• If you are adding data to ArcMap to publish a map service, define a database view that contains only a subset of the data. Database views are stored in the database. You can use the Create Database View geoprocessing tool or an SQL client to define views.
• If you are adding data to ArcMap to publish a feature service, uncheck the option to Make newly added layers visible by default before adding your data to the map. Next, open the Query Builder dialog box and define a subset of data using SQL. Once you have restricted the amount of data that will display in ArcMap, make the layer visible and prepare your map for publishing.

Caution:

Unless your map is set so that data is not automatically displayed when added, do not drag data directly from your database connection in the Catalog window in ArcMap to the map if you have not already defined a subset of data. Extremely large datasets, as are normally stored in a data warehouse appliance, would take an inordinate amount of time to display on the map.