Slowly changing dimensions in HANA Views?

Question

I am a newbie to HANA.Our org is planning to build a native datawarehouse on top of SAP HANA. Till date we have implemented SCD types using the ETL approach in SAP BODS. Wondering if some types of SCD's could be offloaded onto the HANA Studio by utilising the Views in HANA. Please help me in this regard.

Answer 1

This is a rather broad question that does not allow for a single correct answer. With slowly changing dimensions (SCD) one tries to preserve data changes over time in a data warehouse. The idea is that changing “master”-data, eg which sales person is responsible for which sales region, can be correctly reflected in queries. One approach (SCD type 2) uses validity timestamps for the records to indicate the time for which those were the valid information. This approach can be implemented easily with HANA as all one needs to do is to add those validity timestamps to the dimension table. HANA 2 takes this a bit further by providing Bi-temporal history tables (system- and application time). For this use case one could use the application time ranges in combination with the SELECT ... AS OF TIMESTAMP... feature. This will automatically filter the records that were valid at the provided point in time. This is also supported with calculation views, CDS views and SQL views.

Whether or not that is improving upon your existing setup is a different question altogether.