Open Analysis Interfaces  

Purpose

SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence provides an open architecture in many areas: You can extract data from various systems into a BI system and can evaluate this data for your reporting using various front-end tools.

The Business Explorer, the front-end component in BI, provides flexible reporting and analysis tools to support strategic analysis and decision making 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

●      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 graphic illustrates the integration of the interfaces in BI:

Third-party front-end tools can send query requests to the MDX processor in the BI 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 (InfoProviders of type target, such as InfoCube, DataStore object, and InfoObject), or reporting-relevant views of data objects (MultiProviders, VirtualProviders, 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 for accessing BI data using interfaces.

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.