Support SAP HANA

[avhz]

What feature or improvement would you like to see?

Bit of a long shot but would there be any interest in supporting SAP HANA in Python/R ?

[WillAyd]

I definitely see value in this, although testing and setting it up in CI would be very challenging if not downright impossible.

Do you know what SDKs SAP HANA may make available for us to develop against?

[avhz]

I am not sure about this to be honest.

Possibly (?) helpful link: SAP HANA Client Interface Programming Reference

The closest solution I have used is: https://github.com/pacman82/arrow-odbc

This project provides a Python interface that is used by Polars, which means our fetches are significantly quicker on the Python side, but we are lacking an R option.

[WillAyd]

From that documentation it looks like SAP might be creating their own proprietary SQLDBC layer that the ODBC driver and others are built on top of. It might be nice to dive a little deeper into that, but the documentation suggests that is sadly only for internal use

It looks like they also offer a JDBC client, so you could try ADBC over JDBC for Java applications, although that won't solve the specific use case you have in mind

[lidavidm]

I've been meaning to start work on an ODBC bridge, just haven't found the time again

For us to test SAP HANA in CI we would need a way to run the database (preferably under Docker) and an appropriate license. Possibly something like this: https://hub.docker.com/r/saplabs/hanaexpress

[avhz]

If there is anything that could be done, I would be interested in helping.

I'm not familiar with Arrow internals but I would like to learn.

[WillAyd]

Assuming the ODBC bridge is our best option, then it might be worth discussing further how to build that in #72

[xhochy]

Sadly the ODBC driver has some restrictive license terms (SAP Developer License Agreement) but there is a well-maintained Go driver using the Apache 2.0 license: https://github.com/SAP/go-hdb Building on top of that might be a better approach.