Classic FTW!
Book review: Mastering SAP BusinessObjects Analysis, edition for OLAP with SAP NetWeaver BW
SAP BusinessObjects Analysis, edition for OLAP is probably the one BI4 tool I have spent the least time in yet. It can be seen as the successor to the BEx Web Analyzer and it is the web counterpart of SAP BusinessObjects Analysis, edition for Office.
For my projects this might be a very useful tool to offer to our users since it is fully integrated in the BI Launchpad platform and doesn’t require any locally installed software (in contrast to the Office edition, which uses an MS Excel plugin).
Ingo Hilgefort wrote an eBook that is fully dedicated to Analysis OLAP in combination with SAP BW as a data source: Mastering SAP BusinessObjects Analysis, edition for OLAP with SAP NetWeaver BW.
I picked up the Kindle edition at Amazon.com which was quite cheap at $14,51. I think if you are living in the USA the price will be even lower (around $10) due to ‘some’ taxes we have to pay in the European Union. Anyway, with or without taxes this obviously is no money for this kind of content.
After positioning the tool within the SAP BusinessObjects BI portfolio and discussing the data connectivity options the book quickly dives into the details. Since it is focussed on SAP BW environments as a datasource only, literally all the BW and BEx stuff is discussed: BEx Query elements, variable types, hierarchical functionality and so on. For every one of these features it is stated how Analysis OLAP supports it. Also some comparisons are made with the BEx Web Analyzer and Analysis Office.
Next the book demonstrates in a step-by-step manner the features of Analysis OLAP. Here a load of screenshots are used, so it is very clear what you have to do. I didn’t have access to an environment with Analysis OLAP when reading the book but with the clear texts and figures I could easily follow what was happening. The book ends with a chapter on deployment of Analysis OLAP which gives some interesting performance tweaking tips.
I got the book on my Kindle, which is a small device and has no colors. A lot of tables are used in the book and the formatting of them gets messed-up on my Kindle. The screenshots are also quite hard to view. Luckily I can also use the Kindle app on my Mac to view the details. Unfortunately the indexing from chapter 4 and up doesn’t work. So you have to scroll page by page to the right section if you want to look up something in stead of just clicking the section in the table of contents. Hopefully Ingo will fix this and also keep updating the contents of the book every time a new service pack is released. Good stuff!
Mastering SAP BusinessObjects Analysis, edition for OLAP with SAP NetWeaver BW [Kindle Edition] by Ingo Hilgefort.
Getting into SAP HANA (part 3): SAP HANA Starter book
Last year I got a bit stuck when playing around with the SAP HANA Studio on our Amazon AWS HANA setup. In the meanwhile a great book (SAP HANA: An Introduction) has been published providing all the ins-and-outs of HANA. This book is on the #1 best-seller spot at SAP Press for months now!
Time to get some actual hands-on experience with those Analtyic views and Calculated attributes. I found this book called SAP HANA Starter by Mark Walker, which appeared to be an extremely practical guide to get you started with HANA and let you learn the basics of the SAP HANA Studio tool.
The book starts with a basic intro to HANA, including some explanation on the column-based database. This is all very very short, but that’s okay because the purpose of this book is to give some practical guidance, not all the theory. Next the book takes you through the installation, the setup of SAP HANA Studio itself and finally a big example scenario is followed. This is all done in a step-by-step manner, supported with a lot of screenshots.
What I really like about the demo scenario that is worked out throughout the book is that you don’t have to set up things like a connected source database or an additional tool like Data Services or so to get started. The book show you how to create some new tables and how to use some SQL statements to create some demo data yourself. Based on these tables a scenario is followed in which objects like the analytic view, attribute view, filters, calculated attribute, graphical calculation view and so on are discussed and created step-by-step. If you follow all the steps, in the end the result of your ‘HANA application’ can be presented through MS Excel.
SAP HANA Starter is a very to the point and hands-on ebook and will be useful for you if you are a SAP HANA Studio first timer. The book has about 50 pages of content which will keep you busy for a sunday afternoon. The ebook is priced around $9,-, which is just good value.
SAP HANA Starter by Mark Walker, ISBN 9781849688680.
Errors after promoting BI4 reports with BEx query data sources
Transporting (or promoting) objects in the SAP BusinessObjects BI4 environment is still a bit weird for those (like me) originally coming from the SAP BW world. The Lifecycle Manager (LCM) webapp somehow doesn’t feel as robust as the Transport Management System in SAP, but in the end it does the same thing of course.
This week a colleague ran into some errors after promoting his new Web Intelligence and Crystal Reports from our BI4 development environment to the production environment. His reports were created on SAP BW BEx query data sources.
Update: We finally figured out how to work with Override Settings for OLAP Connections to solve this issue. Check the blog post here.
First let’s have a look at the Web Intelligence report. After the promotion he was able to open the Web Intelligence report, but when refreshing the data the following errors appeared:
Errors when trying to refresh the current report.
The universe generation using the resource id has failed. (WIS 00000)
The solution to this issue is quite easy but you just have to know this somehow I guess: You have to manually reconnect each SAP BW BEx query with the Web Intelligence report.
Yes, this just feels odd. We are used to the Transport Management System to take care of these things. Also I think it’s a bit strange to standard having to edit reports in a production environment, just to make them work. On the other hand, if you only have one BI4 environment on top of multiple SAP BW environments, it might be useful to have the ability to change the data sources of a report to connect to a different system.
Anyway, to fix this just follow the next easy steps:
Article for BusinessObjects Expert on add-ons for Dashboards
I wrote an article for the BusinessObjects Expert platform about add-ons for SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards. These add-ons are third-party plugins that extend the functionality of the standard toolset of SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards and they can consist of additional components or connectivity options. Examples are add-ons that let you load data from CSV-files or offer some specific charting types.
In the article I discuss eight of the coolest add-ons available right now. If you have a BusinessObjects Expert subscription you can check it here.
SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards: Using the Push Button for month input
I got a mail this morning about a blogpost I wrote 2,5 years ago in which I explained how you can use the Push Button component in SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards to increase or decrease a value. The question in the mail was if and how this example could be transformed into a month selector, where the minus button would set February back to January and the plus button would do this the other way around.
There are two challenges here: How to get the names of the months to be shown (and not just the numbers) and how to limit the model to only work between the lowest (January) and highest (December) possible value.[kml_flashembed publishmethod=”static” fversion=”8.0.0″ movie=”http://www.hackingsap.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/push_button_months_small.swf” width=”300″ height=”” targetclass=”flashmovie”]
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To solve this I used a Source Data component. This is a ‘hidden’ component that can move data based on a index number. To set this up I put all the months in the spreadsheet and for clarity I put the corresponding index numbers in front of them. Note: The Source Data component starts with index 0!
As you can see in the two screenshots below I selected the cells with the months [B5:B16] as my source data from which one cell value has to be inserted into destination [D2]. Item Index [C2] determines which value that should be. In the screenshots the index number is 0, so “Jan” should be displayed in [D2].
