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SAP ByDesign Icon SAP ByDesign ODBC Driver

The SAP ByDesign ODBC Driver is a powerful tool that allows you to connect with live data from SAP ByDesign, directly from any applications that support ODBC connectivity.

Access SAP ByDesign data like you would a database - read, write, and update SAP ByDesign Customers, Products, Leads, Suppliers, etc. through a standard ODBC Driver interface.

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Analyze SAP ByDesign Data in R


Create data visualizations and use high-performance statistical functions to analyze SAP ByDesign data in Microsoft R Open.

Access SAP ByDesign data with pure R script and standard SQL. You can use the CData ODBC Driver for SAP ByDesign and the RODBC package to work with remote SAP ByDesign data in R. By using the CData Driver, you are leveraging a driver written for industry-proven standards to access your data in the popular, open-source R language. This article shows how to use the driver to execute SQL queries to SAP ByDesign data and visualize SAP ByDesign data in R.

Install R

You can complement the driver's performance gains from multi-threading and managed code by running the multithreaded Microsoft R Open or by running R linked with the BLAS/LAPACK libraries. This article uses Microsoft R Open (MRO).

Connect to SAP ByDesign as an ODBC Data Source

Information for connecting to SAP ByDesign follows, along with different instructions for configuring a DSN in Windows and Linux environments.

Set the following connection properties to connect to SAP ByDesign.

  • Url: Set this to the Url of your SAP ByDesign site. For example, https://test.sapbydesign.com
  • User: Set this to the username of your account.
  • Password: Set this to the password of your account.
  • CustomService or AnalyticsService: Only one of these must be specified. If you have a custom service you want to retrieve data from, specify CustomService. If you want to retrieve the reports of a analytical service, specify AnalyticsService.
    If neither is specified, 'cc_home_analytics.svc' will used as a default for the AnalyticsService property. If you are not sure what service to specify, you can always query the Services view to list available services.

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.

Windows

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.

Linux

If you are installing the CData ODBC Driver for SAP ByDesign in a Linux environment, the driver installation predefines a system DSN. You can modify the DSN by editing the system data sources file (/etc/odbc.ini) and defining the required connection properties.

/etc/odbc.ini

[CData SAPByDesign Source] Driver = CData ODBC Driver for SAP ByDesign Description = My Description URL = https://my999999.sapbydesign.com User = username Password = password CustomService = servicename

For specific information on using these configuration files, please refer to the help documentation (installed and found online).

Load the RODBC Package

To use the driver, download the RODBC package. In RStudio, click Tools -> Install Packages and enter RODBC in the Packages box.

After installing the RODBC package, the following line loads the package:

library(RODBC)

Note: This article uses RODBC version 1.3-12. Using Microsoft R Open, you can test with the same version, using the checkpoint capabilities of Microsoft's MRAN repository. The checkpoint command enables you to install packages from a snapshot of the CRAN repository, hosted on the MRAN repository. The snapshot taken Jan. 1, 2016 contains version 1.3-12.

library(checkpoint) checkpoint("2016-01-01")

Connect to SAP ByDesign Data as an ODBC Data Source

You can connect to a DSN in R with the following line:

conn <- odbcConnect("CData SAPByDesign Source")

Schema Discovery

The driver models SAP ByDesign APIs as relational tables, views, and stored procedures. Use the following line to retrieve the list of tables:

sqlTables(conn)

Execute SQL Queries

Use the sqlQuery function to execute any SQL query supported by the SAP ByDesign API.

[inventory balance] <- sqlQuery(conn, "SELECT ID, ProductCategoryID FROM [Inventory Balance] WHERE ProductCategoryID = '1234567'", believeNRows=FALSE, rows_at_time=1)

You can view the results in a data viewer window with the following command:

View([inventory balance])

Plot SAP ByDesign Data

You can now analyze SAP ByDesign data with any of the data visualization packages available in the CRAN repository. You can create simple bar plots with the built-in bar plot function:

par(las=2,ps=10,mar=c(5,15,4,2)) barplot([inventory balance]$ProductCategoryID, main="SAP ByDesign [Inventory Balance]", names.arg = [inventory balance]$ID, horiz=TRUE)