SAP Data Services is a software application. Its main function is to integrate and transform data and help extract SAP data from various sources. These include web services, databases, applications, and data stores. The extracted data is very useful to businesses as they can combine, process, and transform it for real-time analytics.

What is the SAP Extractor  

The SAP Extractor is a data management feature of SAP. It is widely used to extract SAP data from source systems to be stored in business intelligence systems or downstream data warehouses. The main goal of launching the SAP Extractor is to extract SAP data for feeding SAP BW applications. Businesses can integrate data with an SAP Extractor even if they do not use BW. 

Types of SAP Data Extractors

There are three ways to extract SAP data with SAP BW Extractors.

·        Application Specific Content Extractors that are used for extraction of BW content, FI, HR, CO, SAP CRM, and LO cockpit.

·        Application Specific Customer-Generated Extractors that are primarily used for LIS, FI-SL, and CO-PA.

·        Cross Application Generic Extractors that function on the DB View, Infoset, and Function Modules.

The Functions of SAP Data Extractors

The SAP Extractor, a program in SAP ERP, is used to extract SAP data and transfer it to BW. The Extractor can either be a customized DataSource that details a full load and delta load process of different types or a standard DataSource. The data transfer part of the program is remotely controlled by the SAP BW.    

The Extractor also populates the delta queue with new and changed records when it is of the delta type. The data can then be transferred to SAP BW simply through a data transfer remote call. To extract SAP data and transfer it to the input layer of SAP Business Warehouse, the load process with an InfoPackage in the scheduler has to be defined.

This input layer of SAP BW is also known as the Persistent Staging Area (PSA). When the InfoPackage has to be implemented with process chains being used for executions, the data load process is triggered by a request IDoc to the source system.

Several extractors to extract SAP data are specific to applications and are hard-coded for the Data Source to be delivered with the BI Content of the Business Warehouse. They precisely match the architecture of the Data Source. The different types of Extractors can be used to extract SAP data and move it to BW.

SAP Extractors are fully automated, and after the generic extractor names the Data Source, they can identify which data has to be extracted and the tables from where data is read-only.

It is possible to extract SAP data, regardless of the application, with an Extractor that consists of master data attributes or texts, transaction data from all transparent tables, or database views. The Data Source can generically read and transfer the data to the BW.