Yes, loading real-time Tweets are possible, using the Twitter Streaming APIs Uwe highlighted. You can write your own interface directly to the API, or take advantage of one the many Twitter libraries available to ease integration with their APIs. If using a library, you should double-check the library is current with the most recent changes to the API, including OAuth versions and SSL support. Some of the libraries tend to lag behind Twitter policy changes which is an issue for production applications, but many do a good job of keeping up-to-date ahead of change deadlines.
Twitter provides a level of free access to streaming public Tweets to developers. The statuses/filter and statuses/sample streams provide a random sample of public Tweets streamed to the API consumer. At the free public level of access, the statuses/filter stream will match tracking criteria you define in terms of keywords, users and/or geographic location. The percentage of the full Twitter “firehose” you receive is determined by Twitter. The free level of access is a great place to start for development. You’ll want to review the Twitter Developer Rules early in your project to ensure compliance.
There are many ways to load Tweets into SAP HANA. Alot depends on the specific use case(s) you have for consuming the information. How fast does it need to be persisted in HANA? What sort of analytics will be performed? What amount of time is business-tolerable between application of analytics and a response?
Since you mentioned “using any intermediate tools”, one such tool that you may consider for a match to your use case is SAP Event Stream Processor (ESP). SAP ESP is the stream processing part of SAP Data Management. It is used for capture, filtering, analysis, and enrichment of multiple streams of high-speed, high-volume complex event data in real time, while loading real-time data into SAP HANA. It comes with a HANA output adapter that is optimized out-of-the-box for loading streaming data into HANA with very high throughput and very low latency. SAP ESP may or may not fit your use case; if you think it might, the ESP SCN area is here; an evaluation version of the software can be downloaded from there. Note that SAP ESP does not come with an out-of-the-box Twitter Streaming API Input Adapter, so for SAP ESP to consume the Twitter Streaming API, you would need to create a custom input adapter using the ESP adapter toolkit or one of the ESP SDKs.
Kind Regards,
Mike Weadley
SAP