Query SAP Business Warehouse Data through ODBC in Node.js

Node.js is a JavaScript runtime environment that allows you to run JavaScript code outside of a browser. With the CData ODBC Driver for SAP Business Warehouse, you can access live SAP Business Warehouse data from Node.js apps and scripts. In this article, we walk through installing node-odbc and the required tools to create a simple Node.js app with access to live SAP Business Warehouse data.

With built-in optimized data processing, the CData ODBC Driver offers unmatched performance for interacting with live SAP Business Warehouse data in Node.js. When you issue complex SQL queries from Node.js to SAP Business Warehouse, the driver pushes supported SQL operations, like filters and aggregations, directly to SAP Business Warehouse and utilizes the embedded SQL engine to process unsupported operations client-side (often SQL functions and JOIN operations).

Connecting to SAP Business Warehouse Data

If you have not already done so, provide values for the required connection properties in the data source name (DSN). You can use the built-in Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator to configure the DSN. This is also the last step of the driver installation. See the "Getting Started" chapter in the help documentation for a guide to using the Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator to create and configure a DSN.

To connect to SAP Business Warehouse, set the URL property to a valid SAP Business Warehouse server base URL. The driver must connect to SAP Business Warehouse instances hosted over HTTP with XMLA access.

The driver supports the following authentication schemes via the AuthScheme property:

• None: Anonymous authentication, if available on the server.
• Basic: Set User and Password and set AuthScheme to Basic.
• Kerberos: See the Using Kerberos section of the help documentation for the required Kerberos properties.

By default, the driver attempts to negotiate SSL/TLS by checking the server's certificate against the system's trusted certificate store. To specify another certificate, see the SSLServerCert property for the available formats.

Building node-odbc

In order to connect to SAP Business Warehouse through the CData ODBC Driver, you need to build node-odbc manually (after installing the required tools).

Installing the Required Tools

The following commands install the tools required to build node-odbc (note the -g parameter, which installs the tools globally).

npm i -g windows-build-tools
npm i -g node-gyp

Building node-odbc

After installing the required tools, create a directory for the Node.js app and install odbc (which builds the binary for us to use in our Node.js script).

mkdir nodeodbc
cd nodeodbc
npm i -g node

Querying SAP Business Warehouse from Node.js

With the ODBC Driver installed, a DSN Configured, and node-odbc built, we are ready to query live SAP Business Warehouse data from a Node.js app. The sample code below connects to a specific DSN and queries the Sales table.

myscript.js

const odbc = require('odbc');

async function querySAPBusinessWarehouse() {
    const connection = await odbc.connect(`DSN=CData SAPBusinessWarehouse Source`);
    const data = await connection.query('SELECT CustomerCount, City FROM Sales');
    console.log(data);
}

querySAPBusinessWarehouse();

Once you write the app, use node to execute the script:

node myscript.js

Download a free, 30-day trial of the CData ODBC Driver for SAP Business Warehouse and start working with your live SAP Business Warehouse data in Node.js. Reach out to our Support Team if you have any questions.