"The best way to predict the future is to shape it yourself"
(Alan Kay)

Dear customers and business partners,

Christmas is just a few days away and the year 2023 is slowly coming to an end. We send you our warmest Christmas greetings and hope that this festive season is filled with joy, love and contemplation for you.

The end of the year is a great opportunity to look back on the past blog year. In our annual review, we traditionally present the most-read posts in 2023. We hope that these will make you curious about the coming blog year, which will bring many new interesting posts for you.

By far the most read article this year "How to generate external HANA views from BW objects" from our blog series "External HANA views" deals with the automatic creation of HANA views based on BW objects. InfoObjects, ADSOs, CompositeProviders or even queries can serve as templates. This allows you to connect the business warehouse to the SQL layer, which can be consumed by any front-end tools. This eliminates the need for a physical data transfer, which is often necessary with third-party tools.

The connection to SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC), SAP's cloud reporting and planning tool, is even easier. Because SAC can access BW queries directly. With the introduction of Story 2.0, the new "Optimized Design Experience" was fundamentally expanded and Stories and Analytic Applications were merged. In 2023, we witnessed a paradigm shift in the SAC landscape. Accordingly, there was great interest in our article "Story 2.0 - The big Optimized Design Experience Update". In this blog post, we explain SAP's underlying vision, discuss the new features and benefits as well as potential challenges that may arise during migration.

In 2023, SAP also delivered a long-awaited option for debugging advanced formulas in SAC Planning. We highlighted this function in the article "Advanced Formula Debugging with SAP Analytics Cloud", which was also very popular. The insights gained through debugging help developers to optimize the SAC data actions and eliminate potential problems.

In addition to SAP Analytics Cloud, Apache Airflow also took center stage this year. It is one of the most modern tools for planning and monitoring digital workflows. Our article "Data-Aware Scheduling with Apache Airflow Datasets" describes the benefits of data-driven planning, while another popular article, "How to Scale Data Processing Tasks with Apache Airflow Celery", covers scaling of data analytics.

SAP Datasphere, formerly SAP Data Warehouse Cloud (DWC), was another cloud product that was in focus in 2023 alongside SAP Analytics Cloud. If you are interested in SAP Datasphere, we recommend our interview with Dr. Hagen Jander, Vice President of Data Warehouse Product Management & Strategy at SAP. In our article “Interview with Hagen Jander: SAP Datasphere - more than just marketing?" he answers questions about the future plans surrounding SAP Datasphere. SAP Datasphere is the new strategic Business Warehouse product from SAP and is constantly being expanded with new functions. However, Datasphere goes beyond a mere "data warehouse" and should rather be understood as an integration platform that provides data warehousing functionalities as well as a data catalog and data marketplace, among other things. In 2023, we have already been able to gain a wealth of experience through our first Datasphere projects, which will optimally prepare us for the coming year and new projects.

We hope you find this selection interesting. We would like to take this opportunity to thank you for the good cooperation this year. Your interest, feedback and questions are important to us and motivate us to continue to be there for you in the new year.

We wish you happy holidays and only the best in the coming year 2024. 

Best regards

Your NextLytics team