Accessing Data through Business Objects

[deleted_user]

Hello all,

I was wondering if anyone was familiar with a solution that would allow SAS to use the Business Objects Universe to access data. Is there anything like this out there?

I would really appreciate any thoughts or ideas you might have.

David

[deleted_user]

I guess the BO Universe is a set of database tables such as DB2 - you will have to use the libname statement to retreive this data: like this:

LIBNAME tablename DB2 SSID=DB21;

research more on LIBNAME.

Hope that helps.

[deleted_user]

It does help to some extent. The thing is that a Business Objects Universe is a collection of metadata stored in a proprietary structure in an oracle set of tables.

I am hoping someone may know a bit more about if it is possible or if there are tools that are available to use.

[Cynthia_sas]

Hi:
That means this is not really an ODS or Base Reporting procedure question.

Can SAS access Oracle tables? Yes. Tech Support can help you with the LIBNAME statement to read Oracle tables. Once you point to the Oracle tables or run a query against them, then you could use any of the SAS reporting procedures and ODS to produce reports.

Can SAS read Business Objects proprietary metadata? That's also a question for Tech Support.

cynthia

[edwardp33]

Did you ever get a response to this?

[Georgetastic]

Here's the response I got from SAS Technical Support. A thorough answer, it looks like you can go either way:

SAS can access other vendors' data using either:

SAS/ACCESS to ODBC:communicates with other vendor's ODBC driver and necessary client software SAS/ACCESS to OLEDB:communicates with other vendor's OLEDB provider and necessary client software

So, depending on if your vendor supplies either and ODBC driver or OLEDB provider then SAS should be able to access the data with one of the above products.

Another option would be if your application can access other vendors' data using ODBC, then you could sit in your application and access SAS data sets using the SAS ODBC driver.

Here's a document to help setup the SAS ODBC Driver:

http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/odbcdref/64777/PDF/default/odbcdref.pdf

I found a paper at the link below. a method that they are using does not require any Access engine that might be helpful to you. 

http://www.nesug.org/proceedings/nesug03/et/et003.pdf

Thanks,

Varsha

SAS Technical Support

Cary NC