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Creating a relational connection to Hana

The BI 4.0 BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform can provide reporting and application tools for the new SAP Hana platform.   Possible connections include relational and olap connectivities.  This discussion is limited to the relational connection for Web Intelligence.

 

Purpose

The purpose of this document is to provide a resource for universe designers to create a relational connection to the new Hana platform for SAP BusinessObjects  for  the semantic layer and the reporting tools that utilize a universe layer, such as Web Intelligence,  Crystal Reports Enterprise and Dashboards.

Overview

Hana can be used as a logical relational reporting database.  The high capacity in memory storage is transparent to the universe designer.   The data is queried as rows and columns as standard databases. 

 The two types of relational connections include the Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) and Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) 

ODBC – Open DataBase Connectivity

Microsoft-driven specification for relational reporting

Database requests are made via SQL (Structured Query Language)

Heavily adopted in industry

No longer Microsoft-centric - Unix and Linux drivers exist for ODBC

JDBC – Java DataBase Connectivity

Relational reporting drivers specified by the Java community.  Popular on Unix platforms.

 

Install the JDBC or ODBC Driver

Use JDBC or ODBC Driver

  1. The driver must be installed on the client machine where Information Design Tool is running and BI 4.0 server
  2. JDBC driver is installed in the folder :  <install_folder>\dataAccess\connectionServer\jdbc\drivers\newdb
  3. Launch the Information Design Tool
  4. Log into the Repository Resources
  5. Select the Connections Folder
  6. Right Click and insert Relational Connection
  7. Expand the SAP High-Performance Analytic Server Appliance (SAP HANA) 1.0
  8. Select JDBC or ODBC   
  9. Define Parameters:
  10. Authentication Mode
  11. User Name / Password
  12. Server hostname and port number as
  13. <hostname>:<port> where <port> is
  14. the port number (3xx15 where xx is the instance number)
  15. Set Disconnect after each Transaction 

Additional tuning parameters can be defined for database connections to IMCE

Set Arrary Fetch Size – This refers to the number of rows retrieved at a time.  Increasing this value can improve query performance for universes built on tables and information models.  The higher the number the bigger the memory consumption on the machine processing the query (the BI platform server or the client tool) Setting this to 1000 can provide good response times, with the exception of blob objects or long text objects.  These will depend on the average size of those fields.  This parameter has to be set in the connection definition (CNX) file
  Disconnect after each transaction is the recommended setting for the conneciton pooling.

  1. Next create an IDT Project
  2. Create a shortcut connection an put in the new Project
  3. Create the Data Foundation for a single or multi source universe. 
  4. Maps tables and views the universe will be based on Defines joins, reporting contexts
  5. Can define level list of values and parameters based on table fields
  6. The universe allows relational reporting on HANA
  7. Attribute, Analytic and Calculation Views can be accessed in a relational (SQL) manner by using Column Views from the _SYS_BIC schema .
  8. Create a Business Layer on the Hana Data Foundation.
  9. Publish the connection and the business layer to the BI 4.0 repository   

The universe can now be consumed by client tools such WebIntelligence, Dashboards or Crystal Report for Enterprise.

This becomes a relational universe that BI clients will build queries from the Query Panel against this universe and it will appear like any other relational universe.

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