Hi Folks,
In the near future I plan on building a small prototype system not too different from the typical "side-car" scenario, replicating data from a source system (MS SQL Server) into HANA in real-time (or near real-time).
As I'll be doing this on my own dime, I wanted to find out if anyone has experience building something similar? I've managed to provision free developer instances of HANA and SQL Server but haven't located developer versions of any Sybase Replication Server (according to an SAP rep there are none) or Data Services (I haven't looked extensively). Also highly doubt there's something like a developer edition of SLT (and I believe this would require it's own dedicated server?)
I currently have SQLServer installed on the same machine as my Studio (Remote Desktop to CloudShare). I intend on installing the replication/ETL software there as well.
I have no experience with SQLServer but was able to get it up and running pretty easily. I found "native" replication abilities via publication/subscriptions, but it looks like any non-SQLServer DBs aside from Oracle and DB2 are not well supported. They need to be setup with stored procedures, and I was running into obscure errors with these (which I'm of course less familiar with than HANA's familiar error codes 
)
I also searched for open source replication technologies and came across SymmetricDS. I'm not sure how well it'll work with HANA but it may be worth investing some time and energy into.
Before I go down too many rabbit holes, thought I'd reach out to the community and see if anyone else has done similar things? What have your experiences been, setting up replication (or ETL) to HANA cloud instances?
Any insights into developer addition of other replication/ETL software packages would be much appreciated! (For my prototype, no strict realtime requirement, so a simple ETL 1:1 should be okay).
Thanks!