In February 2024 SAP said that third-party tools may no longer call its Operational Data Provisioning framework over RFC. On June 9, 2026 it shipped a patch that enforces this, with an opt-out that ends in December 2026. Thousands of extraction jobs run on that path. This guide explains what ODP is, what the note says in SAP's words, what is blocked and what stays open, what each of SAP's sanctioned alternatives costs, and how to decide, job by job, what to do before December.
Operational Data Provisioning (ODP) is a framework inside SAP systems that exposes data sources, such as extractors, CDS views and BW objects, with delta handling: a subscriber asks for the changes since its last request and gets them from a queue. It was built for SAP's own applications, above all for loading SAP BW.
It can be reached in two ways. Over RFC, the remote function call protocol, which is how SAP applications talk to each other. And over OData, a web protocol SAP exposes for authorised external use. Third-party extraction tools adopted the RFC route because it was fast, and for years SAP tolerated it.
“Any use of ODP-RFC by customer or third-party applications to access SAP ABAP systems … is prohibited.” [3]
The ODP APIs are “intended and designed exclusively for facilitating data transfer between SAP applications” [2].
Version 4 of the note, in February 2024, changed the wording from unsupported to prohibited [1]. On June 9, 2026, SAP's Security Patch Day shipped Note 3748819, which adds a check on the calling program and rejects programs that are not SAP's own [2]. A temporary opt-out, Note 3731818, lets a system keep accepting third-party ODP RFC calls; it expires in December 2026 [1].
| Path | Status | In plain words |
|---|---|---|
| ODP over RFC, third-party caller | Blocked | Rejected by the caller check unless the opt-out is active; the opt-out ends in December 2026. |
| ODP over OData | Permitted | Available for authorised use. Throughput is lower than RFC, so it suits small and medium tables; measure it on your own system. |
| Table reads through a released function module | Permitted | Reads application tables directly. RFC_READ_TABLE itself is for test and development only (SAP Note 382318) [5]; a released module is used in production. |
| BAPIs and released function modules | Permitted | Reads and writes business objects with SAP's business logic applied. |
| Released CDS views | Permitted | SAP-defined views released for extraction on S/4HANA, some delta-enabled. |
| Change pointers, extractor delta queues | Permitted | Application-layer change capture. |
| Reading the HANA database log | Unsupported | SAP publishes and certifies no interface for it (SAP Note 2971304) [5]. |
| SAP Datasphere, Business Data Cloud, SLT | Licensed | SAP's own services: sanctioned, metered in capacity units or licensed separately. |
| Road | What it is | What it costs you | When it fits |
|---|---|---|---|
| ODP over OData | The same ODP sources over the web protocol. | Lower throughput; job rewrites; no licence. | Small and medium tables; low change rates. |
| SAP Datasphere or Business Data Cloud | SAP's own data services, replicating into SAP's cloud. | Capacity-unit metering; a second platform to run; data lands in SAP's environment first. | Estates standardising on SAP's data cloud. |
| SLT | SAP's trigger-based replication server. | A licence and a server; trigger load on the source. | Low-lag replication of specific tables into a HANA target. |
| Released interfaces (Lima's path) | Table reads through a released function module, BAPIs, CDS views, change pointers and delta queues. | No licence, nothing installed in SAP; a first full load to re-seed deltas. | Any estate that wants extraction outside SAP's metered services with nothing installed. |
The figure at the top of the page is the tree. This is how to walk it for a real system.
Both. The note is SAP's statement of what its interface is for; the June 2026 patch is the technical enforcement. Whether an estate is exposed is a technical question the scan answers in a week.
Ask for the date and the mechanism in writing, and count back from December 2026 by the time it takes to convert and reconcile your jobs. The scan gives you that number.
No. Lima reads SAP through table reads via a released function module, BAPIs, released CDS views, change pointers and extractor delta queues, with nothing installed in SAP.
The free scan runs with a read-only user and returns the inventory, the exposure list, the replacement per job and a date plan.
