USE THE SAP BW CONNECTOR IN POWER BI DESKTOP

With Power BI Desktop, you can access SAP BusinessWarehouse (BW) data.

Installation of SAP BW Connector

To use the SAP BW Connector, go through the following installation steps:

1. Install the SAP NetWeaver library on your local machine. You can get the SAP Netweaver
library from your SAP administrator, or directly from the SAP Support Portal. This library is
usually included also in the SAP Client Tools installation.

You can search for SAP Note #1025361 to get the download location for the most recent version.
Make sure the architecture for the SAP NetWeaver library (32-bit or 64-bit) matches your Power BI
Desktop installation, then install all files included in the SAP NetWeaver RFC SDK according to the
SAP Note.

2. The Get Data dialog includes an entry for SAP Business Warehouse Server in the Database
category.

SAP BW Connector features

The SAP BW Connector preview in Power BI Desktop lets users import data from their SAP Business
Warehouse Server cubes. You must specify a Server, System Number and Client ID to establish the
connection.
You can also specify two additional Advanced options: Language code, and a custom MDX statement
to run against the specified server.
If no MDX statement was specified you are presented with the Navigator window, which displays the
list of cubes available in the server, the option to drill down and select items from the available
cubes, including dimensions and measures. Power BI exposes queries and cubes exposed by the BW
Open Analysis Interface OLAP BAPIs.

When you select one or more items from the server, a preview of the output table is created, based
on their selection.
The Navigator window also provides a few Display Options that allow you to do the following:

 Display Only Selected Items versus All Items (default view): This option is useful for verifying
the final set of items selected. An alternative approach to viewing this is to select the Column
Names in the Preview area.

 Enable Data Previews (default behavior): You can also control whether data previews should
be displayed in this dialog. Disabling data previews reduces the amount of server calls, since
it no longer requests data for the previews.

 Technical Names: SAP BW supports the notion of technical names for objects within a cube.
Technical names allow a cube owner to expose user friendly names for cube objects, as
opposed to only exposing the physical names for those objects in the cube.
After selecting all necessary objects in the Navigator, you can decide what to do next, by selecting
one of the following buttons on the bottom of the Navigator window:

 Selecting Load triggers loading the entire set of rows for the output table into the Power BI
Desktop data model, then takes you to Report view where you can begin visualizing the data
or making further modifications using the Data or Relationships views.

 Selecting Edit brings up Query Editor, where you can perform additional data transformation
and filtering steps before the entire set of rows is brought into the Power BI Desktop data
model.

In addition to importing data from SAP BW cubes, remember that you can also import data from a
wide range of other data sources in Power BI Desktop, and then you can combine them into a single
report. This presents all sorts of interesting scenarios for reporting and analytics on top of SAP BW
data.

Troubleshooting

This section provides troubleshooting situations (and solutions) for working with this preview version
of the SAP BW connector.

1. Connectivity for SAP BEx queries

You can perform BEx queries in Power BI Desktop by enabling a specific property, as shown in the
following image: