Important!
Effective the week of April 21, 2025, the metadata scanning functionality has been transitioned to the SKP Cloud. Scanning will no longer be performed using the on-premises Java scanners (deployed on the SKP Connector). For SAP systems, the scan will now cover a predefined list of approximately 2,358 key business tables (see Appendix). If additional tables need to be scanned, they can be included using the new datastore functionality. Refer to Datastores for more information.
Scanning a system datastore ingests metadata into the Syniti Knowledge Platform. Organizations often have too much data in too many systems to realistically process and understand. Ingesting a system into the Syniti Knowledge Platform provides a single source of truth for this metadata that exists throughout an organization’s enterprise architecture.
Once the metadata is scanned, there are a lot of ways to use this metadata, such as:
Link to terms to provide business context to the system datastore’s metadata objects (tables, views, fields, etc)
Use in Quality to support the creation of opportunity and error views that can be used to evaluate the quality of the underlying data
Create a dataset to support the identification and classification of fields within the system datastore. Datasets provide context for various aspects of the Syniti Knowledge Platform, such as
within Quality to define opportunity views; rules are run against these views to assess the quality of the data
to define data objects, such as Customer Master and Material Master, that define the fields required by the business to describe these data objects
to catalog analytic requirements
Use in data migration to support the data design by providing the metadata for the tables and fields that are in scope from both the source and target datastores, and field and value mapping tasks.
Profile tables and views in the system datastore’s metadata to understand the content in more detail, examine patterns, and spot anomalies in the data
Scanning a system datastore is a multi-step process across several pages in the Syniti Knowledge Platform. When performing steps within the Syniti Knowledge Platform, refer to the page-level help for more information. The following steps must be performed prior to scanning a datastore or datastore table:
Note
Changes to the SAP system datastore that affect the metadata of the tables, such as adding new fields (z fields) to a table, made during the system datastore scan, can cause issues with the ordering of the returned metadata that can create duplicate XIDs. Before the scan results are sent to the Syniti Knowledge Platform for ingestion, duplicate records are filtered out.
Download, install, register, and configure an SKP connector. This must be performed by an Administrator.
Contact Syniti Support to obtain the scripts to download.
Refer to the Syniti Knowledge Platform Connector: Security, Installation, Requirements & Troubleshooting knowledge base article for details on how to install and configure the SKP connector.
Create a connection for the new datastore using the Connection list. You must associate the datastore with the SKP connector created in Step 1 with access to the datastore. For SAP, you may select two SKP connectors. By default, scans will run through the database connection.
Once the above steps are completed, you can:
Click the Scan icon in the Actions column of the system Overview page on either the Datastore grid to scan the entire datastore or the Tables grid to scan a specific table.
Click the Scan button at the top right of the system datastore Details page to scan a datastore.
Click the Scan button at the top right of the datastore table Details page to scan a datastore table.
Note
Multiple scans will be initiated for a datastore when the number of database objects to be scanned exceeds 1,000. The database objects are divided into batches of 1,000, with up to six batches running concurrently.
Cancel a Scan
A scan can be canceled if it has not been completed or resulted in an error. It is important to refresh the page to see the latest status of a scan.
Datastore scans can be cancelled by:
Clicking the Cancel scan button at the top right of the system datastore Details page.
Clicking the Cancel scan icon in the Actions column of the system Scans tab.
Table scans can only be cancelled from the system Scans tab by clicking the Cancel scan icon in the Actions column.
Appendix
Key Business Tables for SAP
The spreadsheet below contains a list of approximately 2,358 tables identified as critical for SAP data migrations and to support the AI-Assisted Data Quality report content, which are scanned by the Syniti Knowledge Platform. You can also scan additional tables using the Datastores functionality.