WHITE PAPER 2
Power BI and SAP BW
Abstract: This document describes how SAP customers can benefit from connecting Power BI to their existing SAP Business Warehouse (BW) systems.
Link: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/whitepapers
Published: February 2018
Review:
The paper describes the Microsoft Power BI product and the Sap BW data warehouse and reporting tools.
The writer had the impression that the Power BI section was more “marketing oriented”. This is not a negative remark, it is very likely due to the fact that the paper is written by company producing it.
The most interesting aspect of the product the writer found is the capacity to find correlations in data. This is not a function available without “expert developments in a data warehouse”.
The section describing the Sap BW data warehouse and reporting tools gives enough information without going too deep into technical details.
There is a flaw in the sentence: “Composite Providers are a new data object in BW systems that on HANA, e.g. SAP run BW 7.5 or BW4/HANA. “
As a matter of facts SAP BW 7.5 can also work with an Oracle database.
Another statement is not completely precise:
“Data is embedded into Microsoft Excel workbooks providing analyst users with drag-and-drop capabilities to drill down and filter the data using SAP BI OLAP functions”.
it is true that the Sap BW Bex (alias Analyzer) is an excel Plug-in. But a query in BW displays the data retrieved by the Olap processor from a data provider or a virtual provider. Instead, a workbook displays the data which was previously stored as an excel document. In order to display the latest status of data, the query is used. The workbook would be used to retrieve a “snapshot of the data”.
Integration between Power Bi and Sap BW:
The writer wants to precise that “developing” a query in Sap BW is not restricted to “developers” in the sense of BW developers.
A BW Developer is actually an abap (sap programming language) expert, a data warehouse expert, with data modeling and enough functional skills to implement a viable Sap BW solution including the data providers (back end) and the reporting objects (queries, reports, dashboards, broadasts).
Although BEx Queries have advantages as data sources (also see Performance Considerations section below), customers do not need a Query for every report. Customers will need to weigh the cost of developing and maintaining additional Queries against their reporting requirements.
Actually a good implementation strategy with Sap BW consists in allowing power users to implement their own queries. A BW Bex query does not require development in terms of coding, it requires the knowledge of the Query designer tool, for which there is no need to have programming skills.
There are dependent objects such as variables which value could be determined by a routine. In that case the development of such routine would be under the resposnaiblity of the development team.
The paper has a very detailed section explaining how to perform a connection from Power BI to Sap BW, which could be used as a “technical guide” to complete the task.
Finally the paper offers a very precise and clear section related called “Support to the “Sap BW features” and focuses on the performance considerations.
Reporting performance is very critical, as soon as the datawarehouse data volume is significantly large.
In order to optimize the reporting performance, Sap BW offered a solution called the “BI accelerator” which consisted in a ” Blade server” hosting the data “in memory”. This allowed the Olap processor to access “in memory” data.
This solution is now replaced by the BW on Hana and BW /4 Hana product versions which are based on the SAP HANA in memory database.
The good point about the paper is that there reader can evaluate the pros and cons of integrating the two products and take advantage of the explanations which are very clear and detailed.
Alessandro Filippi 