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SAP BusinessObjects BI Icon SAP BusinessObjects BI ODBC Driver

The SAP BusinessObjects BI ODBC Driver is a powerful tool that allows you to connect with live data from SAP BusinessObjects BI, directly from any applications that support ODBC connectivity.

Access SAP BusinessObjects BI data like you would a database through standard ODBC Driver interface.

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Analyze SAP BusinessObjects BI Data in R


Create data visualizations and use high-performance statistical functions to analyze SAP BusinessObjects BI data in Microsoft R Open.

Access SAP BusinessObjects BI data with pure R script and standard SQL. You can use the CData ODBC Driver for SAP BusinessObjects BI and the RODBC package to work with remote SAP BusinessObjects BI data in R. By using the CData Driver, you are leveraging a driver written for industry-proven standards to access your data in the popular, open-source R language. This article shows how to use the driver to execute SQL queries to SAP BusinessObjects BI data and visualize SAP BusinessObjects BI data in R.

Install R

You can complement the driver's performance gains from multi-threading and managed code by running the multithreaded Microsoft R Open or by running R linked with the BLAS/LAPACK libraries. This article uses Microsoft R Open (MRO).

Connect to SAP BusinessObjects BI as an ODBC Data Source

Information for connecting to SAP BusinessObjects BI follows, along with different instructions for configuring a DSN in Windows and Linux environments.

To connect to your SAP Business Objects BI instance, you must set the following connection properties:

  • Url: set this to the rest API URL. After logging into the Central Management Console, choose 'Applications' from the combo box. Double-click on 'RESTful Web Service' and you'll see the access URL. By default it is, http://{Server-Name}:6405/biprws.
  • User: set this to the username of your instance.
  • Password: set this to the password of your instance.

When you configure the DSN, you may also want to set the Max Rows connection property. This will limit the number of rows returned, which is especially helpful for improving performance when designing reports and visualizations.

Windows

If you have not already, first specify connection properties in an ODBC DSN (data source name). This is the last step of the driver installation. You can use the Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator to create and configure ODBC DSNs.

Linux

If you are installing the CData ODBC Driver for SAP BusinessObjects BI in a Linux environment, the driver installation predefines a system DSN. You can modify the DSN by editing the system data sources file (/etc/odbc.ini) and defining the required connection properties.

/etc/odbc.ini

[CData SAPBusinessObjectsBI Source] Driver = CData ODBC Driver for SAP BusinessObjects BI Description = My Description User = username Password = password Url = http://myinstance:6405/biprws

For specific information on using these configuration files, please refer to the help documentation (installed and found online).

Load the RODBC Package

To use the driver, download the RODBC package. In RStudio, click Tools -> Install Packages and enter RODBC in the Packages box.

After installing the RODBC package, the following line loads the package:

library(RODBC)

Note: This article uses RODBC version 1.3-12. Using Microsoft R Open, you can test with the same version, using the checkpoint capabilities of Microsoft's MRAN repository. The checkpoint command enables you to install packages from a snapshot of the CRAN repository, hosted on the MRAN repository. The snapshot taken Jan. 1, 2016 contains version 1.3-12.

library(checkpoint) checkpoint("2016-01-01")

Connect to SAP BusinessObjects BI Data as an ODBC Data Source

You can connect to a DSN in R with the following line:

conn <- odbcConnect("CData SAPBusinessObjectsBI Source")

Schema Discovery

The driver models SAP BusinessObjects BI APIs as relational tables, views, and stored procedures. Use the following line to retrieve the list of tables:

sqlTables(conn)

Execute SQL Queries

Use the sqlQuery function to execute any SQL query supported by the SAP BusinessObjects BI API.

mycustomreport <- sqlQuery(conn, "SELECT StoreName, TotalRevenue FROM MyCustomReport WHERE State = 'CA'", believeNRows=FALSE, rows_at_time=1)

You can view the results in a data viewer window with the following command:

View(mycustomreport)

Plot SAP BusinessObjects BI Data

You can now analyze SAP BusinessObjects BI data with any of the data visualization packages available in the CRAN repository. You can create simple bar plots with the built-in bar plot function:

par(las=2,ps=10,mar=c(5,15,4,2)) barplot(mycustomreport$TotalRevenue, main="SAP BusinessObjects BI MyCustomReport", names.arg = mycustomreport$StoreName, horiz=TRUE)