SAP Datasphere·Conference briefing·Checked 20 Sep 2026

SAP Datasphere · Business Data Cloud · September 2026

Ten things worth saying out loud

A conference briefing for SAP BI professionals and managers. Six insights, two questions, two ideas. Each one is current, sourced, and not yet common knowledge in the room.

How to use it: read the highlighted line, then the “say it” line. Every item carries a status chip, because the fastest way to lose an expert audience is to present roadmap as shipped. All claims were checked against their primary source on 20 September 2026. Datasphere ships every two weeks, so re-check the week you travel.

01

At a glance

The story of 2026 in one line: Datasphere stopped being a product you buy and became the modeling and data-product core of BDC, while SAP closed the side doors to its data, put meters on the front door, and moved the BW deadline one more time.

#TypeThe one-linerStatus
1InsightThe BW 7.5 clock now reads 2027, 2030, 2033. The road to 2033 runs only through BDC.New, Sep 2026
2InsightBW modernization is three tools. The one for ETL logic does not exist yet.2 shipped, 1 roadmap
3InsightThird-party ODP-RFC extraction has a December 2026 deadline.In force
4InsightZero-copy is neither zero copies nor zero cost.GA
5InsightJoule administers Datasphere. It does not model in it yet.GA vs preview
6InsightIn 90% of SAP's biggest deals, in 4% of landscapes at scale.Survey data
7QuestionAfter Dremio, where does the semantic layer live?Roadmap
8QuestionCan you run a data mesh with one domain?GA with gaps
9IdeaDesign for the meter: a write now costs twelve reads.GA, 9 Sep 2026
10IdeaUse the 2033 runway to sequence, not to wait.Proposal
02

Six insights

1

InsightNew · September 2026

The BW 7.5 clock now reads 2027, 2030, 2033

This month SAP introduced the BDC Modernization Option for SAP BW NetWeaver.1 BW 7.5 in private cloud edition inside BDC can keep running from 1 January 2031 to 31 December 2033, with a 12-month minimum term.

It is not offered on-premise, and not for BW in a plain RISE private cloud. The ABAP stack has no restrictions; BPC 10.1 and SEM-BCS are included. The Java stack ends on 31 December 2030.

The PCE move already extends maintenance to the end of 2030. Going from RISE PCE to BDC later is a commercial change, not a second technical migration.2

Figure 1 · Three end dates for the same BW 7.5 system

On-premise mainstream maintenance ends 2027 Private cloud edition (PCE) to end of 2030, no extra fee Modernization Option only PCE inside BDC → 2026 31 Dec 2027 31 Dec 2030 31 Dec 2033
Each extension is tied to a deployment. The last three years exist only inside BDC. Subscription to the option opens in September 2026; the service term itself starts in 2031.

Say it like this

“The news is not three more years. The news is that the only road to 2033 runs through BDC.”

2

Insight2 tools shipped1 roadmap

BW modernization is three tools, and the one for ETL logic does not exist yet

  • Data Product Generator (shipped). It is a scheduled copy: a data subscription, run by a process-chain step, pushes InfoProvider data into file-space tables. It is not zero-copy from BW.
  • Query Template Generator (available since July 2026, BW Modeling Tools 2026-06 or later). It migrates query metadata only. In SAP's own example, one query on a CompositeProvider became 81 Datasphere artifacts.3 A partner field report adds: no planning, cell definitions and exceptions are ignored.4
  • BW Migration Assistant (roadmap). AI-assisted migration of transformation logic. SAP's own posts say late 2026, Q4 2026, and Q4 2026 to Q1 2027, and that the name is not final.5

Both shipped tools require a PCE subscription that includes BDC capacity units. Embedded BW is out of scope.

Say it like this

“Data can be exposed today and queries can be regenerated today. The transformation logic, which is where the BW investment really sits, has no shipped tool yet.”

3

InsightIn force since June 2026

SAP is closing the side door and widening the front door

On 9 June 2026 SAP released a security patch that checks every ODP-RFC call and rejects non-SAP extractors.6 It bites once the customer applies the note or a support package that carries it. A temporary opt-out exists and ends in December 2026.7

The paths SAP names as sanctioned: BDC Connect, premium outbound integration, and ODP through OData.

In the same months, Datasphere replication flows learned to read ECC and BW through ODP with no DMIS add-on on the source (2026.10), with delta loads since 2026.16.8

DSAG publicly challenged the new API Policy on 29 April 2026 as going beyond what is technically necessary.9

Say it like this

“If a Qlik, Theobald or Matillion pipeline reads your BW through ODP-RFC, you have a December deadline, whether or not you ever buy BDC.”

CAVEAT · SAP's FAQ cites Security Note 3748819; Qlik's advisory points to Note 3635619 as the delivering note. The notes are behind login and were not opened. Quote the FAQ, not the note text.

4

InsightGA · contractual document

Zero-copy is neither zero copies nor zero cost

A Datasphere view cannot be published as a customer-managed data product. It must be persisted to a HANA table, then written by a transformation flow into a file space. That is two physical copies on the SAP side before “zero-copy” begins.10

The BDC Service Description Guide prices every BDC Connect flavour at 0.185 CU per GB of inter-region transfer and 0.055 CU per 2,500 API calls. For your own Snowflake it adds a data sharing fee of 0.604 CU per US dollar of Snowflake compute spent on SAP data products. There is no such line for Databricks, BigQuery or SAP Snowflake.11

Databricks documents that it may report usage of shared SAP data to SAP per workload, unaggregated and identifying the customer.12 And “semantics preserved” means four things in Unity Catalog: comments, primary keys, foreign keys within one share, and personal-data tags. Read-only.13

Figure 2 · Where the copies are, and which meter each one turns

Datasphere view HANA space HANA local table copy 1 · persisted Local table (file) copy 2 · Delta, HDLF Data product published share Databricks Snowflake BigQuery zero-copy starts here BW InfoProvider BW PCE in BDC Data Product Generator · scheduled copy METERS ON THE SAP SIDE Object store requests (a write ≈ 12× a read) · Spark block-hours · replication-flow hours METERS AT THE BOUNDARY Inter-region transfer per GB · API calls per 2,500 · own Snowflake: fee on compute spend
Zero-copy describes the last hop, not the pipeline. Inter-region transfer is charged when either the hyperscaler or the region differs between BDC and the partner platform.

Say it like this

“Zero-copy describes the last hop. Ask where the copies are before it, and which meter each one turns.”

5

InsightSome GAAgents in preview

Joule administers Datasphere. It does not model in it yet

GA today: natural-language catalog search (2026.10), Joule for administration and navigation (2026.11), AI SQL generation in the SQL view editor and AI summaries of pipelines (2026.19, 9 September).14

Joule's documented Datasphere skills are administrative: users, spaces, monitoring, catalog search. No modeling skill is listed.15 The agents that create data products and analytic models, shown at Sapphire 2026, are private preview.16 The Tenant Health Check Agent is in early adopter care, GA planned for 18 November 2026.

The quieter news sits in HANA Cloud (Q2 2026): a SQL procedure, AI_TABULAR_PREDICTION, calls tabular foundation models such as SAP-RPT-1 from the database.17 SAP-RPT-1 itself retires by 31 December 2026 in favour of RPT-1.6.18

And SAP's own architecture guidance says MCP is connectivity only. It adds no business context by itself.19

Say it like this

“Today Joule runs the tenant, it does not build the model. The modeling agents are still private preview.”

6

InsightSurvey and vendor data

In 90% of SAP's biggest deals, in 4% of landscapes at scale

On the Q2 2026 call (23 July) Christian Klein said AI and BDC were part of more than 90% of SAP's 50 largest deals.20

SAPinsider's Q1 2026 benchmark: 4% broad adoption, 45% still evaluating, 26% no plans at all. Top barriers: budget 44%, landscape complexity 34%, unclear roadmap and positioning 32%.21

DSAG Investment Report 2026 (198 companies): 22% plan medium or high investment in BDC, and 62% base their planning little or not at all on SAP's new suite vision.22

BARC's user survey: 7% of Datasphere customers report no significant problems against a 26% average; connectors and pricing lead the complaints. The same survey rates landscape fit at 83% against 44%.23

Say it like this

“BDC is in nine of ten big contracts and in four percent of landscapes at scale. The distance between those two numbers is the work of the next three years.”

CAVEAT · Small print matters here. BARC's page shows 29 Datasphere reviews, so 7% is about two people. SAPinsider's report is sponsored and states no sample size. Klein's figure is vendor-reported.

03

Two questions

7

QuestionRoadmap · no dates

After Dremio, where does the semantic layer live?

SAP closed the Dremio acquisition on 6 July 2026. The stated direction: BDC becomes an Apache Iceberg-native lakehouse, and an open catalog built on Apache Polaris becomes both the discovery layer and the semantic layer, and the base of the SAP Knowledge Graph.24 No GA date. No word on how it relates to today's Datasphere catalog and analytic models.

Meanwhile sap.com positions Datasphere as the knowledge core of BDC: semantics, data products, modeling.25 And Irfan Khan names the compute engines as HANA Cloud, SAP Databricks and SAP Snowflake. Datasphere is not on that list.26

BARC counts semantics now spread over BDC data products, the Knowledge Graph, Datasphere, BW, SAC and Polaris, and calls Dremio “a query layer, not SAP data liberation”.27 Constellation's Holger Mueller reads the deal as SAP conceding it was behind, with more confusion for customers.28

Ask it like this

“Analytic models, the Knowledge Graph and a Polaris catalog all claim the word semantics. Which one is the system of record for business meaning in 2028, and will what I model in Datasphere today migrate, or be rebuilt?”

8

QuestionGAwith gaps

Can you run a data mesh with one domain?

Data product governance shipped on 9 September 2026: access requests, agreements, stewards. The documentation also says there is exactly one default domain for all data products today.29

Column-level lineage stops at flows.30 Customer data products require transformation flows. So the provenance of a published product is not end to end in the native tool.

Data Product Studio: GA could not be confirmed. Analysts expected it in the first half of 2026;31 SAP's own posts call it both available and in preview, and no release note through 9 September mentions it.

For regulated customers: the two EU Access data centers (Frankfurt EU11, Switzerland CH20) offer Datasphere, SAC, BDC Connect and HANA Cloud, but not SAP Databricks, SAP Snowflake or SAP Reltio as of 20 September 2026.32

Ask it like this

“When do customer-defined domains ship, and when does lineage follow a column through a transformation flow into a data product? Until then, which tool is the system of record for the data contract?”

04

Two ideas

9

IdeaGA · 2026.19, 9 Sep 2026

Design for the meter

Since 2026.19, object store requests are billed in three classes per 1,000 requests: read 0.0015 CU, write 0.0182 CU, control plane 0.0226 CU. A write costs about twelve reads. Spark compute is 0.149 CU per 4 GB block-hour, and the object store needs a base of 128 GB memory.33

SAP positions the file space as inbound staging, not as a reporting layer. No views or analytic models live there, the tenant limit is 20 file spaces, and every SQL-on-files query burns requests. For SLA reporting SAP recommends HANA data marts.34

The idea: make a FinOps review a standard design step, like a performance review was in BW.

  • Batch small writes and lower delta frequency where the business allows it.
  • Test deletion vectors: up to about 90% less Spark on partial updates, but full-table updates can get worse and the option cannot be switched off once deployed.35
  • Keep BDC and the partner platform on the same hyperscaler and region.
  • Serve dashboards from HANA, not from files.

Say it like this

“In BW we tuned for runtime. In Datasphere we tune for runtime and for the meter, and those are not always the same design.”

10

IdeaProposal built on items 1 to 3

Use the 2033 runway to sequence, not to wait

A BW triage by tool readiness. Five buckets, in this order:

  1. Find the exposure. Run SAP's self-assessment report for ODP-RFC usage (SAP Note 3439624, named in SAP's FAQ) before the opt-out ends in December.
  2. Lift. Planning, queries with cell definitions and exceptions, and ABAP-heavy flows stay in BW PCE.
  3. Expose. InfoProviders that feed AI, ML or partner platforms go out through the Data Product Generator.
  4. Regenerate. Simple queries on CompositeProviders go through the Query Template Generator, with a naming and clean-up rule for the artifact sprawl.
  5. Hold. Transformation logic waits for the Migration Assistant, then gets a pilot, not a programme.

BW bridge stays supported to at least 2040 but is not on the BDC innovation path, per SAP's FAQ of March 2025. No newer SAP statement was found.36

Say it like this

“2033 is not permission to wait. It is time to sequence: expose first, regenerate what is simple, and hold the ETL until the tool exists.”

05

Don't forget

Facts that are easy to get wrong in front of people who will notice.

  1. BDC Connect, GA today: Databricks, Snowflake (25 May 2026) and Google BigQuery (20 July 2026, for BDC on AWS or GCP only).37 Not GA: Microsoft Fabric and Amazon Athena.
  2. Fabric: SAP announced Q3 2026. An SAP expert on SAP Community now says end of Q1 2027.38 That is a single source, so ask, do not assert. Athena: SAP's own publications say both H2 2026 and H1 2027.
  3. Datasphere has no price of its own. The pricing page points to BDC core capacity in capacity units. SAP's notice of July 2025 scheduled its removal from the eligible services for new BTPEA, CPEA and pay-as-you-go subscriptions as of 1 January 2026. Existing tenants are preserved, with no technical migration.39
  4. SAP Snowflake is not BDC Connect for Snowflake. The first is sold by SAP and carries no sharing fee. The second is your own Snowflake, with the 0.604 CU per dollar fee.
  5. BW PCE is not BW bridge. PCE is the same BW codeline in a private cloud. BW bridge is an ABAP staging layer inside Datasphere: supported, not strategic.
  6. Partner data products install by federation only. SAP-managed ones offer federation or replication. Installation happens in Datasphere, not in the BDC cockpit.40
  7. BDC Connect is not a replication tool. SAP says so and points to premium outbound integration: 500 CU per 20 GB block for the first ten blocks.
  8. One Datasphere per BDC formation. Adding it migrates the Datasphere catalog into the BDC catalog automatically.
  9. Do not say “the Query Template Generator is GA per the SAP note”, “Joule builds models”, or “Fabric is live”. None of the three could be verified.
  10. Do not cite the BW customer with 75% faster BI build from the Q2 call. The customer name is garbled in every transcript and no independent write-up exists.
  11. Dates that will move this briefing: DSAG Jahreskongress 6 to 8 October, SAP TechEd 27 to 29 October, Tenant Health Check Agent GA 18 November, ODP opt-out end in December 2026.
06

Glossary

Capacity unit (CU)
The single currency of BDC. Every service, Datasphere included, draws from one pool.
BW PCE
SAP BW 7.5 on HANA or BW/4HANA run by SAP in a private cloud. Same code, same features.
Data Product Generator
Pushes BW InfoProvider data into Datasphere file-space tables on a schedule.
Query Template Generator
Turns a BW query's metadata into native Datasphere views and an analytic model. No data moves.
File space, object store
Datasphere storage on HANA data lake files in Delta format, processed by Spark. Cheap to keep, metered to touch.
Customer-managed data product
A data product you publish yourself. Today only from file-space tables.
BDC Connect
Two-way sharing of data products with a partner platform over Delta Sharing, without replication.
Premium outbound integration
The paid, sanctioned way to replicate SAP data out of Datasphere to non-SAP targets.
ODP-RFC
The remote-function interface third-party tools used to extract from BW and ECC. Now restricted to SAP applications.
Apache Iceberg, Apache Polaris
An open table format and an open catalog for it. The announced future base of BDC after the Dremio deal.
ORD and CSN
SAP's open metadata formats that describe a data product and its schema to other platforms.
EU Access
SAP's label for data centers with access restricted to staff in the EU or Switzerland. Fewer BDC components are offered there.
07

Sources

How this was checked

Eight research angles ran in parallel. A second, skeptical checker then re-opened every source: 56 findings, 34 confirmed, 22 corrected, and the corrected wording is what you read here. I then re-verified first-hand the Dremio release, both Databricks pages, the BARC figures, the object store rates, the Service Description Guide and the SAPinsider numbers. SAP Community pages could not be fetched directly from this machine, so those items rest on the two-step check. SAP Notes behind login were not opened.

  1. SAP Community, “Introducing the SAP Business Data Cloud Modernization Option for SAP BW NetWeaver”, September 2026. community.sap.com ↩
  2. Frank Riesner (SAP), “What exactly is SAP BW PCE and what it is not”, first published June 2025, updated September 2026. community.sap.com ↩
  3. Heiko Schneider (SAP), “BW modernization continued with the SAP BW Query Template Generator”, 17 July 2026. community.sap.com ↩
  4. biX Consulting, field report on the Query Template Generator, August 2026 (URL as found). bix-consulting.com ↩
  5. SAP Community, “AI has outgrown legacy data architectures like SAP BW”, 27 May 2026; timing also in the Schneider post above. community.sap.com ↩
  6. SAP, FAQ on ODP-RFC access restrictions, version 1.2, June 2026. sap.com ↩
  7. Qlik Support, “Important update on SAP Data Access Restrictions”, 27 May 2026; see also Theobald Software's opt-out article. community.qlik.com · theobald-software.com ↩
  8. SAP Help Portal, “SAP ECC and SAP BW Sources for Replication Flows”; What's New 2026.10 and 2026.16. help.sap.com ↩
  9. DSAG press release on the new SAP API Policy, 29 April 2026. dsag.de ↩
  10. Vineet Bakshi (SAP), “Customer-managed data products in SAP BDC: what really happens…”, 13 May 2026; confirmed by SAP Help, “Creating Data Products for SAP Business Data Cloud”. community.sap.com ↩
  11. SAP Business Data Cloud Service Description Guide, v9-2026, table of BDC Connect capacity services. assets.cdn.sap.com (PDF) ↩
  12. Databricks documentation, SAP BDC sharing, updated 11 September 2026. docs.databricks.com ↩
  13. Databricks documentation, SAP Databricks “Share data”, semantic metadata section. docs.databricks.com ↩
  14. SAP Help Portal, SAP Datasphere What's New 2026.19, 9 September 2026. help.sap.com ↩
  15. SAP Help Portal, Joule capabilities guide, “Joule in SAP Datasphere”, read 20 September 2026. help.sap.com ↩
  16. SAP Sapphire 2026 Innovation News Guide, 12 May 2026. sap.com ↩
  17. SAP Community, “What's new in SAP HANA Cloud, July 2026”, 3 July 2026. community.sap.com ↩
  18. SAP Community, “Prior Labs TabPFN-3.5-Plus is available now in SAP AI Core”, 15 September 2026. community.sap.com ↩
  19. SAP Architecture Center, “Third-Party MCP Access to SAP Solutions”, updated 8 June 2026. architecture.learning.sap.com ↩
  20. SAP Q2 2026 earnings call, 23 July 2026, transcript and highlights. investing.com · finance.yahoo.com ↩
  21. SAPinsider benchmark report, “SAP Business Data Cloud Use Cases and Adoption”, March 2026 (sponsored research). sapinsider.org (PDF) ↩
  22. DSAG Investment Report 2026, press release of 26 February 2026. dsag.de ↩
  23. BARC, user review of SAP Datasphere (29 reviews), read 20 September 2026. barc.com ↩
  24. SAP News, “SAP to Acquire Dremio”, 4 May 2026, and “SAP Completes Dremio Acquisition”, 6 July 2026. news.sap.com · completion ↩
  25. sap.com, “SAP Datasphere in Business Data Cloud” product page, read 20 September 2026. sap.com ↩
  26. Irfan Khan, SAP News, on BDC at Sapphire, 13 May 2026. news.sap.com ↩
  27. BARC, “Perspective on SAP's dual acquisition of Prior Labs and Dremio”, 4 May 2026. barc.com ↩
  28. Holger Mueller, Constellation Research, on the Dremio and Prior Labs acquisitions, May 2026. constellationr.com ↩
  29. SAP Help Portal, BDC, “Managing the Default Domain”; BDC What's New, 9 September 2026. help.sap.com ↩
  30. SAP Help Portal, SAP Datasphere, “Impact and Lineage Analysis”. help.sap.com ↩
  31. BARC, “SAP Data & Analytics 2026”, February 2026. barc.com ↩
  32. SAP Help Portal, “Data Center Availability in SAP Business Data Cloud”, read 20 September 2026. help.sap.com ↩
  33. SAP Help Portal, “Configure the Size of Your SAP Datasphere Tenant”, object store table. help.sap.com ↩
  34. SAP documentation, “Create a File Space to Load Data in the Object Store”; Hannes Keil (SAP), “Sizing the SAP Datasphere Object Store”, 17 April 2026. github.com/SAP-docs · community.sap.com ↩
  35. SAP documentation, “Creating a Local Table (File)”, deletion vector option. github.com/SAP-docs ↩
  36. SAP Community, “SAP Business Data Cloud FAQs”, 3 March 2025; SAP Architecture Center, “Modernizing SAP BW with SAP Business Data Cloud”, updated 12 May 2026. community.sap.com · architecture.learning.sap.com ↩
  37. SAP Help Portal, “Provisioning SAP BDC Connect”; SAP Community GA announcements for Snowflake (25 May 2026) and BigQuery (20 July 2026). help.sap.com · Snowflake GA · BigQuery GA ↩
  38. SAP Community Q&A, “SAP BDC Connect for Microsoft Fabric GA”, answer by an SAP product expert, late August 2026. Not corroborated elsewhere. community.sap.com ↩
  39. sap.com, SAP Datasphere pricing page, read 20 September 2026; SAP Help, “Provisioning SAP Datasphere” in BDC. sap.com · help.sap.com ↩
  40. SAP Help Portal, SAP Datasphere, installing data products and delivery methods. help.sap.com ↩