Has any of you had the privilege of working with SAP and particularly
Business Warehouse (which is, If I am correct, the OLAP engine/piece of
SAP) against Designer or Reporter?
If yes, would you be kind to share any information you have? I am
interested in the following (the ‘how?’ side of it):
-Connectivity part (ODBO?)
-Reporter versus BusinessExplorer (SAP-BW Excel add-in)
-Universe versus Infocube
From what I have been able to gather about SAP-BW, it already provides
reporting capabilities off ‘cubes’ as any ROLAP environment but I am
interested to know if and how anyone has implemented it in real life with
BO since it was announced on the BusinessObjects web site.
The SAP web site is not much help except that it claims that their
BusinessExplorer does all the reporting and the BusinessObjects web
site does not say much either…
Thanks in advance for any help.
I apologize for the bad formatting of this email. I am a Telnet session
right now…
We have some experience with SAP-BW and the BO connectivity. You are correct, the connectivity to BW from BO is via ODBO (OLE DB for OLAP) only.
You do not use Designer againt BW to create static Universes. Connectivity to BW from BO will be via a BO Access Pack like you would talk to Essbase OLAP server currently or BW or MS Plato OLAP servers in the future (ie, Version 5.0 of BO).
In order to test BO with BW, you need Beta 2 of BO v5.0. This is the first release that this connectivity becomes available.
Now, comparing SAP’s Business Explorer (BEX) to BO is not exactly an apples to apples comparison. For one, the architecture is different. BEX is essentially an Excel add in (as you know), in which case once your report is built, it does not have the embedded mirocube functionality of a BO report (ie, off-line analysis capability). In addition, BEX is not as mature as BO (functionality wise). Also, you cannot create reports based off of multiple BW InfoCubes which is equivalent to creating reports in BO from multiple Universes or multiple fact tables in a single universe. In addition, security is still maturing with BEX to support row/column level security. I am interested to see how BO will support security defined within BW.
Beta 2 has only officially become available March/99. We we begin testing 18th; we know more than.