Got SAP BW? Get Tableau.
Today at the SAP Influencer Summit, Vishal Sikka (SAP’s CTO) demonstrated Tableau connecting to SAP BW running with HANA. Vishal showed Tableau connecting directly to a BW system to analyze a large data set seamlessly. He analyzed over 28M rows of data with near instantaneous response times.
SAP is working with Tableau Software to bring real-time visualization to business information. SAP HANA powers exploratory and investigative analysis with no pre-built queries and materialized views at accelerated speed for businesses to have a conversation with their data.
This is exciting as it will help SAP customers have an unconstrained conversation with their data.
Here’s a quick demo of Tableau connected to SAP BW running on HANA.
But even without Hana, you’ll be able to use Tableau on top of BW. You will get the same functionality as you do when connecting Tableau to OLAP sources. Just connect and go.
The Tableau and SAP partnership will bring this new connection to market in the new year. If you are interested in finding out more details, please contact your Tableau account manager for information about the timing and possibility of participating in the Tableau-SAP BW beta program when it begins.
Comments
Does this mean connecting to a BusinessObjects Universe is in the future? That would help current SAP BusinessObjects customers "leverage" their legacy investments in Universes.
Hi Jason - we have no immediate plans to support a BusinessObjects Universe.
are u connecting to the infocube or to a bex query here?
Strongly agree with the request for connection to BO Universes, would be a complete game changer!!
This is wonderful to see progress. Will desktop be enabled to the BW Bex queries or only directly to the Infocubes? Both would be beneficial (of course).
From what I understand of Tableau's approach, this will work for both Infocubes and BEx queries.
what about consuming directly HANA views ?
That is correct, we will be able to support both Infocubes and BEx queries. In the video posted on the blog I was connected to a BEx query.
With regards to connecting directly to HANA, our goal is to support that as well. The 3rd-party APIs for HANA are not available yet.
Actually, HANA does have an OLE DB for OLAP interface which supports the MDX query language. We already use Microsoft Excel to connect directly to SAP HANA. So, in theory, Tableau should be able to connect directly to SAP HANA and issue MDX queries.
When will this native BW connectivity become available as demonstrated in your video?
Hi Cote - we do not have a timeframe yet but we are hoping for the next few months. As soon as we have more details on release dates we will update the blog.
Will this native connector to BW be using OLE DB for OLAP (ODBO) interface or SAP's native BICS? Thanks!
it will connect through the OLE DB for OLAP (ODBO) layer.
What will be the impact on the performance of the BW system when connected without HANA ?
Jay - the performance will be as good (or as bad) as your BW system. Hana definitely makes things much, much faster. You can always deploy the NetWeaver Business Warehouse Accelerator to improve the BW system performance.
Will there be as well a direct connector to SAP ECC ?
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