Access Live SAP Business Warehouse Data in SAS JMP via ODBC

You can use the CData ODBC Driver for SAP Business Warehouse to integrate live data into your statistical analysis with SAS JMP. The driver proxies your queries directly to the SAP Business Warehouse API, ensuring that your analysis reflects any changes to the data. The CData ODBC Driver supports the standard SQL used by JMP in the background as you design reports.

This article shows how to access SAP Business Warehouse data into a report and create data visualization. It also shows how to use SQL to query SAP Business Warehouse data from the JMP Query Builder.

Access SAP Business Warehouse Data 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 Data with the Query Builder

After you have created the SAP Business Warehouse DSN, you can use SQL to invoke the capabilities of the SAP Business Warehouse API. Follow the steps below to execute some supported queries in the Query Builder:

1. In SAS JMP, click File -> Database -> Query Builder. The Select Database Connection dialog is displayed.
2. Click New Connection.
3. On the Machine Data Source tab, select the ODBC DSN you configured and then click Next.
4. The Select Tables for Query dialog is displayed and in the Available Tables section, select a table and click Primary. After choosing the primary table, click Build Query to open the Query Builder.
5. As you drag Available Columns to the Included Columns tab, the underlying SQL query is updated and you can view the generated SQL Query in the SQL tab.
6. Click Run Query to display the data.
7. To refresh the results with the current data, right-click Update from Database and click Run Script.

Visualize SAP Business Warehouse Data

After importing, you can use the Graph Builder to create graphs visually. To open the Graph Builder, click the Graph Builder button in the toolbar.

1. Drag a dimension column onto the x axis. For example, CustomerCount.
2. Drag a measure column onto the y axis. For example, City.
3. Select a chart type. For example, a bar chart.