Hi,

I did the same thing years ago. At the time (10 years ago) I saw the potential of big data and distributed compute (like Spark) and decided to focus on something else than what SAP delivered. It was not easy as you can imagine, coming from a closed eco system like SAP.

But nowadays things have evolved rapidly and I see no reason why it should not be possible.

The biggest mindshift is not learning to program in python/scala/... but 'thinking distributed'.

Learning where Spark excels and where not, getting used to lazy evaluation, learning functional programming concepts (which I believe is overlooked very often, it is so valuable though) etc.

SAP + Databricks integration is certainly valuable as SAP tends to be pretty closed (even if they claim not to be). Databricks just wants to get data, so if SAP opens up, that would be pretty great. Of course, the proof of the pudding... SAP has promised a lot in the past.

So anyhow: do it, you are already late 🙂