SAP HANA Blockchain Service – Explained in Simple Words

SAP’s offering on Blockchain can be majorly categorized in 2 parts – SAP Cloud Platform Blockchain Service and SAP HANA Blockchain Service. Last week SAP announced general availability of SAP HANA Blockchain Service.

In this blog I will try to explain what SAP HANA Blockchain Service is and how it helps enterprise in simple words.

Background – Why SAP HANA Blockchain Service came? What problem does it solve?

Blockchain technology is disrupting today’s world. SAP Cloud Platform Blockchain Service is SAP’s major offering in blockchain technology. It is a blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS) offering, which provide an easy and low risk approach to create blockchain based applications in the cloud. While its leading to many innovations, there is a minor issue. What if we need to combine the blockchain data with SAP’s existing master/transaction data and do analytics?

Blockchain generates data in blocks. In the early phase customers are very unlikely disrupt their complete ecosystem and move everything to blockchain. A hybrid ecosystem is what we will have where few data is in blockchain while rest of them are in traditional ERP. For analytics purpose, we would need to consolidate all the data together. This is where SAP HANA Blockchain Service comes into picture.

With SAP HANA Blockchain Service, customers can combine the blockchain data with master/transaction data from SAP HANA and get complete analytical solution.

What is SAP HANA Blockchain Service?

In simple words, SAP HANA Blockchain Service provides the facilities to connect external blockchain networks to SAP HANA. With the help of this service, we can bring blockchain data to a SAP HANA database or move data from SAP HANA database on to the blockchain.

The major advantage is that it allows us to create analytics not just on blockchain data but combine it with master or transaction data from SAP system.

Difference between “SAP Cloud Platform Blockchain Service” and “SAP HANA Blockchain Service”

SAP Cloud Platform Blockchain Service is a blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS) offering, which provide an easy and low risk approach to create blockchain based applications in the cloud. The SAP Cloud Platform Blockchain Service is available as part of the SAP Cloud Platform Cloud Foundry environment. It currently supports Hyperledger fabric and MultiChain.

SAP HANA Blockchain does not provide any blockchain platform but rather helps connecting blockchain platforms to SAP HANA.

Components of SAP HANA Blockchain Service

There are 2 components of SAP HANA Blockchain Services:

1. SAP HANA Blockchain adapter
2. SAP HANA Integration Service

SAP HANA Blockchain Adapter

SAP HANA Blockchain Adapter is an Smart Data Integration (SDI) connector that is deployed on SAP HANA and connects it to SAP Cloud Platform Blockchain service. This helps exchanging data back and forth between SAP HANA and blockchain platform.


Blockchain data is represented as virtual tables inside HANA database. With these virtual tables, blockchain data can be replicated to the HANA database and changes to the blockchain data are detected and applied continuously to the HANA tables. HANA database users can access blockchain data via SQL queries.

SAP HANA Integration Service

The SAP HANA Integration Service is deployed on SAP Cloud Platform and helps to configure connection properties on Cloud Platform side.
The SAP HANA Integration Service provides APIs to fetch data from blockchain node and write data back onto it. These APIs are used by SAP HANA Blockchain Adapter, to manage the data exchange between SAP HANA and blockchain.

SAP HANA Blockchain Service Help Documents

To know more about on the topic, refer to following documents:
SAP HANA Blockchain Adapter 
SAP HANA Integration Service
SAP blockchain solutions
SAP HANA Blockchain: An introduction


Source: https://blogs.sap.com/2018/11/15/sap-hana-blockchain-service-explained-in-simple-words/?source=social-Global-SAP+Developers-LINKEDIN_COMPANY-AudienceEngagement-Developers-SAPHANA&campaigncode=CRM-XB18-DGE-SM09