How to Build an ETL App for SAP Business Warehouse Data in Python with CData

The rich ecosystem of Python modules lets you get to work quickly and integrate your systems more effectively. With the CData Python Connector for SAP Business Warehouse and the petl framework, you can build SAP Business Warehouse-connected applications and pipelines for extracting, transforming, and loading SAP Business Warehouse data. This article shows how to connect to SAP Business Warehouse with the CData Python Connector and use petl and pandas to extract, transform, and load SAP Business Warehouse data.

With built-in, optimized data processing, the CData Python Connector offers unmatched performance for interacting with live SAP Business Warehouse data in Python. When you issue complex SQL queries from 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

Connecting to SAP Business Warehouse data looks just like connecting to any relational data source. Create a connection string using the required connection properties. For this article, you will pass the connection string as a parameter to the create_engine function.

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.

After installing the CData SAP Business Warehouse Connector, follow the procedure below to install the other required modules and start accessing SAP Business Warehouse through Python objects.

Install Required Modules

Use the pip utility to install the required modules and frameworks:

pip install petl
pip install pandas

Build an ETL App for SAP Business Warehouse Data in Python

Once the required modules and frameworks are installed, we are ready to build our ETL app. Code snippets follow, but the full source code is available at the end of the article.

First, be sure to import the modules (including the CData Connector) with the following:

import petl as etl
import pandas as pd
import cdata.sapbusinesswarehouse as mod

You can now connect with a connection string. Use the connect function for the CData SAP Business Warehouse Connector to create a connection for working with SAP Business Warehouse data.

cnxn = mod.connect("URL=https://mysapserver:8000;AuthScheme=Basic;User=username;Password=password;")

Create a SQL Statement to Query SAP Business Warehouse

Use SQL to create a statement for querying SAP Business Warehouse. In this article, we read data from the Sales entity.

sql = "SELECT CustomerCount, City FROM Sales WHERE Country = 'US'"

Extract, Transform, and Load the SAP Business Warehouse Data

With the query results stored in a DataFrame, we can use petl to extract, transform, and load the SAP Business Warehouse data. In this example, we extract SAP Business Warehouse data, sort the data by the City column, and load the data into a CSV file.

Loading SAP Business Warehouse Data into a CSV File

table1 = etl.fromdb(cnxn,sql)

table2 = etl.sort(table1,'City')

etl.tocsv(table2,'sales_data.csv')

With the CData Python Connector for SAP Business Warehouse, you can work with SAP Business Warehouse data just like you would with any database, including direct access to data in ETL packages like petl.

Free Trial & More Information

Download a free, 30-day trial of the CData Python Connector for SAP Business Warehouse to start building Python apps and scripts with connectivity to SAP Business Warehouse data. Reach out to our Support Team if you have any questions.

Full Source Code

import petl as etl
import pandas as pd
import cdata.sapbusinesswarehouse as mod

cnxn = mod.connect("URL=https://mysapserver:8000;AuthScheme=Basic;User=username;Password=password;")

sql = "SELECT CustomerCount, City FROM Sales WHERE Country = 'US'"

table1 = etl.fromdb(cnxn,sql)

table2 = etl.sort(table1,'City')

etl.tocsv(table2,'sales_data.csv')