Backend: SAP HANA

[javierluraschi]

While SAP HANA has been reported to work with dbplyr, there is functionality that is unsupported and will need special translations in dbplyr, for instance:

• dbplyr::compute() and dbplyr::copy_to() require temp tables to be prefixed with #.
• No support for logical types since BIT require a different mapping.

In order to test and resolve those issues, a SAP HANA cloud instance can be started in Amazon thorough SAP HANA on AWS and Azure SAP HANA.

The ODBC drivers can be downloaded as follows:

• Register as a SAP Developer under developers.sap.com
• Download the ODBC from SAP HANA Client Software Packages.

CC: @edgararuiz

[hadley]

Do we have a specific need/request for SAP HANA support?

[xstodeepak]

It would be awesome for the entire corporate community for which SAP HANA is the backbone of entire reporting. Around 90-95% of the organizations use SAP HANA for all of their reporting needs.

Having dbplyr support for SAP HANA would immensely benefit the developer/data scientist community, since, HANA database has complex table structures and lack of BI Infrastructure with SAP. Getting BI projects done by IT teams is really a pain and having dbplyr support for SAP Hana will ease this pain to a very large extent.

Hence, requesting SAP HANA database support by dbplyr.

[joshmuncke]

+1 request for HANA dbplyr translation.

We’re pretty organisationally locked into HANA as an RDBMS and dbplyr has been a big unlock for our teams.

Being able to make full use of dbplyr functionality and particularly upload/temp table creation would be huge for us.

[hadley]

• identifier/string quoting should hopefully be taken care of by the odbc driver
• data types (for escaping and as.* translations): https://help.sap.com/viewer/7c78579ce9b14a669c1f3295b0d8ca16/Cloud/en-US/20a1569875191014b507cf392724b7eb.html
• uses || for string concatenation
• SELECT docs: https://help.sap.com/viewer/7c78579ce9b14a669c1f3295b0d8ca16/Cloud/en-US/20fcf24075191014a89e9dc7b8408b26.html
• Temporary tables use LOCAL TEMPORARY COLUMN TABLE (https://help.sap.com/viewer/4fe29514fd584807ac9f2a04f6754767/2.0.03/en-US/20d58a5f75191014b2fe92141b7df228.html) — also need # name.
• String functions: https://help.sap.com/viewer/7c78579ce9b14a669c1f3295b0d8ca16/Cloud/en-US/20a24d4b75191014afc5ac3b997d3ce2.html
• Same problem as MS SQL with distinct predicate and boolean types: https://help.sap.com/viewer/4fe29514fd584807ac9f2a04f6754767/2.0.03/en-US/f044a9c7fb7b49159384f92f147345fb.html