SAS and SAP BW / HANA interfacing via Data Surveyor

[edv2017]

Hi,

After reading several guides and forums on interfacing between SAS and SAP BW/HANA I am still confused therefore I still have a question.

When we use the Data Surveyor and use it with BW is it meant to ETL data or can we keep the data in BW and report via SAS on this data?

If we can keep the data in BW and use SAS reporting is it performant for big datasources?

Or is it not possible and should we use the OLE DB setting within the BW query?

Thanks in avance,

Best Regards,

Eelco de Vries

[RonAgresta · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Generally speaking, if you use Data Surveyor for SAP, you are querying SAP for metadata about available data, and you will be using that information to pull data into SAS Data Sets. From there, you can use any number of SAS applications to interact with the data. There's an extra step involved (loading the data into a SAS LASR server for SAS Viya CAS server) if you want to use SAS Visual Analytics for reporting.

Ron

[tvsoest]

Dear Ron,

Can you please elaborate on the extra step involved thoget data from SAP BW, via the Datasurveyor, into Viya CAS for VA?

Kind regards,

Tim.

[LouGalway_sas]

Tim,

The extra step is to load data to CAS in your SAS Data Integration job.  I am assuming that you are using the SAS9M5 release of SAS Data Integration, there is a transformation that you can use to load data to CAS.  Once the data is in CAS a user with appropriate permissions can access the data in VA.

I hope that helps.

[RonAgresta]

In SAS Viya, you can either write a program to create a CAS library to connect to the SAS Data Set and load into into an in-memory CAS table that can be uses by VA, or you can use the Data Explorer component in the UI of SAS Viya, still create a CAS library to connect to the data, and then load the data into a CAS table. Depending on the size of the Data Set you can also try to use the Import feature in Data Explorer to load the data into a CAS table.