Open Analysis Interfaces  

Purpose

The SAP Business Information Warehouse provides an open architecture in many areas: You can extract data from different systems into a BW system and you can evaluate this data in your reporting using various front-end tools.

The Business Explorer, the front-end component in the SAP Business Information Warehouse provides flexible reporting and analysis tools for strategic analysis and decision-making support in your organization.

For more information, see:

●      Query Design: BEx Query Designer

●      Web Application Design: BEx Web Application Designer

●      Analysis & Reporting: BEx Web Applications

●      BEx Mobile Intelligence

●      Analysis & Reporting: BEx Analyzer

●      Formatted Reporting: Crystal Reports Integration

●      Organizing: BEx Browser

●      Collaboration & Distribution: Integration into the Enterprise Portal

The following interfaces are available to connect third-party front-end tools to BI:

●      OLE DB for OLAP (ODBO)

●      OLAP BAPI (Business Application Programming interface)

●      XML for Analysis (XML/A)

All these interfaces are based on MDX (Multi-Dimensional Expressions). For more information, see MDX as Basis for the Interfaces.

Integration

The following figure illustrates how the interfaces are integrated in the SAP Business Information Warehouse:

Third-party front-end tools can send query requests to the MDX processor in the BW system via the available interfaces. This processor forwards the request to the OLAP processor. The OLAP processor accesses InfoProviders. These InfoProviders either contain the data objects themselves (InfoProvider with type data target, such as InfoCube, ODS object and InfoObject), or reporting-relevant views of data objects (MultiProvider, RemoteCube, InfoSet).

Features

The following table provides an overview of the available interfaces:

OLE DB for OLAP (ODBO)	OLAP BAPI	XML for Analysis (XML/A)
Technical Basis
·         COM (Component Object Model) protocol  ·         MDX is query request language	·         RFC (Remote Function Call) protocol ·         MDX is query request language	·         XML is exchange format ·         HTTP/SOAP protocol ·         MDX is query request language
Prerequisites
Driver installed on client system	Access library available from all SAP platforms
Platform Dependence
Only MS Windows platforms	All platforms supported by SAP	All platforms
Unicode Capability
Fully Unicode-enabled	The caller specifies the required Code Page when establishing the RFC connection.	Fully Unicode-enabled, by default UTF-8 (Unicode Transformation Format, 8 bit display).
Availability
As of SAP BW 1.2B	As of SAP BW 2.0A	As of SAP BW 3.0A

The following overview illustrates the options discussed above that are available to access SAP BW data via a particular interface.

Constraints

Platform Dependence

The interface used depends on the platform: OLE DB for OLAP requires MS Windows, OLAP BAPI requires an SAP platform. XML for Analysis is platform independent.