SAP Business Warehouse Reporting and Star Schemas in OBIEE

The CData ODBC Driver for SAP Business Warehouse is a standard database driver that can integrate real-time access to SAP Business Warehouse data into your data warehouse or directly into your reporting tool. This article shows how to bypass the data warehouse and import operational SAP Business Warehouse data into Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE).

See the knowledge base for ODBC integrations with ETL tools like Informatica PowerCenter. For an ETL solution into Oracle Warehouse Builder, use the driver with the Oracle ODBC Gateway to Access SAP Business Warehouse Data as a Remote Oracle Database.

Connect to SAP Business Warehouse as an ODBC Data Source

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.

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.

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.

Import SAP Business Warehouse Metadata

Follow the steps below to use the OBIEE Client Tools to import SAP Business Warehouse metadata into an OBIEE repository. You can then integrate SAP Business Warehouse data into your business models.

1. Open the Administration Tool and click File -> New Repository.

2. In the Connection Type menu, select ODBC 3.5 and select the CData DSN.
3. Select the metadata types you want to import under the Relational Sources option and then select SAP Business Warehouse tables.