16.11 SAP Integration Playbook & Architect Checklist
Source selection
- Business object identified.
- Authoritative source identified.
- Supported source interface selected.
- CDS release status checked.
- Extraction capability checked.
- ODP requirements checked.
- Source-release prerequisites checked.
Connectivity
- Correct Datasphere connection type selected.
- Network path validated.
- Authentication designed.
- Source authorizations minimized.
- DEV/TEST/PROD isolated.
Data engineering
- Grain documented.
- Keys validated.
- Initial-load strategy defined.
- Delta semantics documented.
- Delete behavior validated.
- Schema evolution assessed.
- Reconciliation designed.
Performance
- Source workload tested.
- Network throughput measured.
- Target throughput measured.
- Parallelism tuned from evidence.
- Scheduling avoids source contention.
Operations
- Monitoring configured.
- Failure recovery documented.
- Reinitialization procedure documented.
- Incident owner defined.
- Business reconciliation defined.
Architect interview framework
When asked:
"How would you integrate S/4HANA with SAP Datasphere?"
Answer:
- Identify the business object.
- Prefer a supported business-semantic source contract.
- Evaluate CDS and ODP capabilities.
- Decide federation versus replication.
- Design initial and delta processing.
- Validate source prerequisites.
- Design security.
- Validate grain and reconciliation.
- Engineer performance.
- Design monitoring and recovery.
- Define ownership.
- Document rejected alternatives.
Common traps
"CDS means real-time."
No. CDS is a modeling/source interface. Delivery mode depends on the supported integration pattern.
"ODP is a database."
No. ODP is an extraction/provisioning framework.
"ODQ is Datasphere storage."
No. ODQ is part of the operational delta-processing architecture in relevant ODP scenarios.
"Replication is always better than federation."
No. Latency, workload, cost, history, and consumer behavior determine the choice.
"A successful initial load proves integration is correct."
No. Grain, totals, keys, and delta behavior still need validation.
"More threads always improve performance."
No. Source and target bottlenecks can make additional parallelism harmful.
Final architect test
You should be able to defend:
- why you selected the source interface,
- why you chose CDS or ODP,
- why you replicated or federated,
- how deltas work,
- how failures recover,
- how source security works,
- how performance is controlled,
- how reconciliation proves correctness,
- how the architecture scales across multiple S/4 systems.
Phase 16 completion statement
The objective is not to become a connector administrator.
The objective is to become capable of designing a production-grade SAP application-to-Datasphere integration architecture.