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Purpose

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

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

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

  • OLE DB for OLAP (ODBO)
  • OLAP BAPI (Business Application Programming Interface)
  • XML for Analysis (XML/A)
  • Easy Query
Features

The following table provides an overview of the various interfaces:

OLE DB for OLAP (ODBO)

OLAP BAPI

XML for Analysis (XML/A)

Easy Query

Technical Protocol

COM(Component Object Model) protocol

RFC (Remote Function Call) protocol

HTTP/SOAP protocol

HTTP/SOAP protocol

Query Language

MDX

Service-Specific Entry Parameters

Data Provision

Data is formatted in generic form.

Processing of data is flexible, but therefore complex as well.

Data and some metadata from the standard view of a defined query is in typed format.

Data can be processed very easily.

Communication

Stateless

Client-Side Requirements

Drive installation on clients (see Integration and Installation ).

Download SAP NetWeaver BW ODBO 32 bit (as part of the WINDOWS SAP GUI) from SAP Service Marketplace (SMP authorization required):

http://service.sap.com/swdcInformation published on SAP site → Installations and Upgrades → Installations and Upgrades Entry by Application Group → SAP Frontend Components → SAP GUI FOR WINDOWS.

Access library provided on every SAP platform.

Download the RFC lib from SAP Service Marketplace (SMP authorization required):http://service.sap.com/swdcInformation published on SAP site → Installations and Upgrades → Installations and Upgrades Entry by Application Group → Additional Components → SAP RFC SDK.

SOAP client proxy must be generated on the basis of the WSDL description.

Platform Dependency

For MS Windows platform only

Every platform supported by SAP

Every platform

The following overview illustrates the options for accessing BW data using interfaces.

Constraints

Platform Dependency

The interface used depends on the platform: OLE DB for OLAP requires MS Windows, OLAP BAPI requires an SAP platform. XML for Analysis und Easy Query are non-platform dependent.