Analysis for Office - Connectivity to HANA without ODBC Drivers

[Former Member]

Hello All -

We are trying to develop Analysis for Office workbooks on native HANA views (calculation views, analytical views) and would like to know if the end user that needs to execute the analysis workbook needs to have the ODBC driver installed on his machine?

I would like to know if there is a way to avoid having to force the end users to install the ODBC drivers in their laptops if possible. We are saving the workbook to the BI Platform and even though we created a shared connection in CMC, it still seems to force the availability of ODBC drivers on the executing machines.

Any help in this regard is highly appreciated...

PS: We are on AO Version 1.3...

Regards

Sudheer B.

[former_member193885 · Accepted solution]

Sudheer,

With the current release of AO it uses ODBC connectivity to HANA, the BI Platform is only getting the system information to the client. The data connectivity is handled by the drivers on the client side.

Page 14 of the roadmap deck below talks about the native connectivity to HANA which does not require the client.  Hopefully this will be available in the GA version of AO 2.0.

Native HANA
 Direct http connectivity to InA engine (Information Access) – replacing SQL/ODBC access

https://websmp110.sap-ag.de/~sapidb/011000358700000395262012D.pdf

Thanks.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Deepu -

Thank you for a very quick response. I was afraid that having ODBC driver is the only way to go through BO connection!.

What about using the BW connection for HANA views? When we tried leveraging the BW (BICS) connectivity, we are able to access HANA views and consume them through that route which does not force for ODBC drivers to be installed.

Basic testing has identified some bugs with the data formatting with this option but are there any other cons with going forward with this path? With this approach it seems like the system generates a query in BW (entry in RSRREPDIR) and calls the HANA views through a generated program...

Any inputs on this approach?

Regards,

Sudheer B.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Sudheer,

your approach is for sure one which works, but that is not the recommended one.

You are not leveraging the performance benefit of Hana.

I would not go this way...

Regards

Thorsten

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Thank you Thorsten.

Any other reasons than performance impacts for not recommending this approach?

Regards,

Sudheer B.

[former_member193885 · Accepted solution]

With the BW approach you need to make sure the ID exists in BW and overhead on the BW system etc.  Performance difference would be the biggest factor.  I would be interested in knowing what you are seeing in terms of performance difference in this case.

Relational vs OLAP conection:  I have not done any performance benchmarks or used the JDBC option with AO, so won't be able to comment.

[Former Member]

Also, knowing that we need ODBC drivers with either, there are two options for connecting to HANA

OLAP

Relational

For reporting on HANA views through Analysis for Office...do you recommend the OLAP connection or the relational connection (or does it even matter)? Thanks again!

Regards,

Sudheer B.