Connect to SAP Business Warehouse Data in Ruby

The CData ODBC Driver for SAP Business Warehouse makes it easy to integrate connectivity to live SAP Business Warehouse data in Ruby. This article shows how to create a simple Ruby app that connects to SAP Business Warehouse data, executes a query, and displays the results.

Create an ODBC Connection to SAP Business Warehouse Data

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.

Installing Ruby and Necessary Gems

If you do not have Ruby installed, refer to the Ruby installation page. With Ruby installed, you will need to install the ruby-dbi, dbd-odbc, and ruby-odbc gems:

gem install dbi
gem install dbd-odbc
gem install ruby-odbc

Create a Ruby App with Connectivity to SAP Business Warehouse Data

Create a new Ruby file (for example: SAPBusinessWarehouseSelect.rb) and open it in a text editor. Copy the following code into your file:

#connect to the DSN
require 'dbi'
cnxn = DBI.connect('DBI:ODBC:CData SAPBusinessWarehouse Source','','')

#execute a SELECT query and store the result set
resultSet = cnxn.execute("SELECT CustomerCount, City FROM Sales WHERE Country = 'US'")

#display the names of the columns
resultSet.column_names.each do |name|
  print name, "\t"
end
puts

#display the results
while row = resultSet.fetch do
  (0..resultSet.column_names.size - 1).each do |n|
    print row[n], "\t"
  end
  puts
end
resultSet.finish

#close the connection
cnxn.disconnect if cnxn

With the file completed, you are ready to display your SAP Business Warehouse data with Ruby. To do so, simply run your file from the command line:

ruby SAPBusinessWarehouseSelect.rb

Writing SQL-92 queries to SAP Business Warehouse allows you to quickly and easily incorporate SAP Business Warehouse data into your own Ruby applications. Download a free trial today!