Reporting on SAP HANA – Overview

Once the modeling view (attribute view, analytic view and calculation view) is created in SAP HANA, you can see the output in HANA Studio.

Finally it will be non-technical end users (for example manager, sales executive, board members etc.) who will consume the modeling views to visualize different business scenarios.

Asking a non-technical user to use HANA Studio is not really practical. You also would not want to put the modeling software in the hands of all your users.

That’s why we need separate reporting tools which can connect to SAP HANA, take the data from modeling views and show in a nice, easy to understand format.

Currently there are number of tools/applications which can be used for reporting in SAP HANA. SAP suggests using frontends of the SAP Business Objects BI Suite. Recommended frontend tools include SAP Business Objects Crystal Reports, Analysis Office, and Explorer.

Reporting on SAP HANA can be done in most of SAP’s Business Objects BI Suite of applications, or in tools which can create and consume MDX queries and data.

Microsoft Excel can also be used for reporting on SAP HANA.

You can use Excel to connect to SAP HANA, access the modeling views and slice and dice” data to create meaningful reports.

Note: You can think of SAP Business Objects BI Suite as a collection of different front-end tools provided by SAP. Most important of them are

• SAP BusinessObjects Analysis
• SAP BusinessObjects Explorer
• SAP Lumira
• SAP Business Objects Crystal Reports
• SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards

Reporting on SAP HANA – Clients and Connectivity Options:

SAP HANA supports different connectivity options such as MDX, SQL, BICS etc. It provides JDBC and ODBC drivers which are standardized programming interfaces to access relational databases.

Below image shows the different connectivity options supported for frontend tools and SAP HANA.

• ODBO – OLE DB for OLAP
• Microsoft-driven specification for multidimensional (MDX) reporting
• Requests are sent to the database via MDX (MultiDimensional eXpression language)
• ODBC – Open DataBase Connectivity
• Microsoft-driven specification for relational reporting
• Database requests are made via SQL (Structured Query Language)
• Heavily adopted in industry
• No longer Microsoft-centric – Unix and Linux drivers exist
• JDBC – Java DataBase Connectivity
• Relational reporting drivers specified by the Java community. Popular on Unix platforms.
• BICS – BI Consumer Services
• SAP Proprietary interface that offers advantages for OLAP access over MDX on multidimensional reporting objects
• Common driver technology used by SAP BusinessObjects Analysis, Office Edition for connectivity to SAP NetWeaver BW
• SQLDBC is SAP native database SDK

In the next session we will see how to use Excel for reporting on SAP HANA.

Click here to go to Next Chapter. 5.2 Using Excel for Reporting on SAP HANA