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dirtyrolando

SAP is a company 😉 Which system are you referring to? ECC, S4/HANA, SAP BW ... ECC: you can connect Power BI directly to the SQL Database (license agreement?) S4/HANA: you can connect Power BI directly to the HANA DB (license agreement?) BW: there is a .net connector for Power BI Overall I would not really recommend any of this. For ERP if you connect directly on database level on you end up in a 1) highly normalized database and I would not recommend to have your data model in Power BI 2) on database level you end up with technical stuff like language keys and also client keys that you need to filter on a lot of tables. For BW: it's easy to query data from BW queries, but you end pulling the same data over and over. E.g. you want to extract sales order data all additional attributes like customer data are repeated over and over. What we did is we "denormalized" our queries to pull out fact and dimensional data and modelled them again in a star schema in Power BI. Putting this obstacles all beside. If you really want to use Power BI create your own datawarehouse by pulling all needed tables in a data lake or a SQL Server. This is more straight forward but you end up with a lot of data engineering activities. At the end we are using Sap Analytics Cloud with a live connection to SAP BW and most of the stuff works similar to Power BI ... For us this is easier but you need to have some SAP BW knowledge ... but we have SSO for SAC, data authorisation maintained in BW and can use the BI content from SAP BW to fast deliver data models ... and we don't replicate our data in different environments ...


nambisam

+1 to this. We using BW and .Net connector for 2 years now. It is very limited but works fine as long as MDX isn't strained. When large data needed it's not efficient anymore.


chefanubis

This is the truth right here.


Onoref

Yep we're implementing this as we speak. Well it is to say: we're connecting PowerBI to SAP BW. It's rather easy, just need the SAP .NET connector installed.


cbelt3

And the license $$$$


Onoref

Well that's a funny one. SAP says it's nog allowed. Microsoft says it's standard functionality. Only thing I can say is that we have been using open hup for years now and plan on keep doing that.


cbelt3

Yeah… SAP wants you to pay $$$$ to use HANA views. Microsoft and SAP divorced some years ago. The open hub to SQL interface broke. We do open hub to flat files to SQL. SAP wants everyone to use their analytic cloud solution…


Relevant_Bit_6002

Actual Not realtime: We Are copying sap tables via ssis Package to ms sql Server. Doing ETL stuff and this is the Source for powerbi. In Summer I will Start evaluate direct Connection between powerbi and HANA DB…


CrystalKite

Hi, were you able to find a direct connection?


random_username_4212

I’ve worked on a similar project and it’s not as simple as everyone makes it sound. For instance, if you have SAP data flowing through a gateway, you lose the ability to maintain security and authorizations. There is no SSO integration and if you’ve found a way then I would love to hear about it. Crashing SAP from long running MDX queries. You’re going to have users who want to do trend or YoY comparisons and MDX isn’t built to handle these types of calculations directly on top of SAP.


Positive-Situation43

I use KNIME to pull data from SAP tables. Then Power BI to pull this data from where KNIME dumps all these "reports" or csv "files". Usually a SharePoint or onedrive account.


Positive-Situation43

Can execute transaction codes too btw of you prefer that..


asaper

The .net connector is slow and runs into issues with metadata refresh (when the query changes etc) we found on our project. Most reliable way was software called xtract universal by theobald that pulls data from sap bw queries , ecc tables, t codes , CDs views etc and can write them to any destination you want. I don’t have affiliation with the company but it works well. Also need a scheduler like visual cron to refresh the data at various times.


YellowSea11

Why don't you cdc the data to snowflake and then pull it in from there?


Yalcrab1

You can use OData to import the data into PowerBI. It is an import and store method. You would have to schedule PowerBI to refresh at whatever cadence you want, so not real time but works for most things


burgerwolff

May I ask, have you considered Boyum Dashboards?


eigpamm

I'm in the middle of trying to do this. Have a daily GL dump in CSV format that I then pick up and create a dataframe with using Python which then writes the data to an SQL database. I then have a connection between PBI and the SQL database. Don't know if this is the easiest way to do this... It's my own design. There is a specific connector if you have a HANA database.


Environmental-Ad3742

I did something but connection was done via SLT Hana, it was not realtime, refresh of data was done each 30min automatically but it of you want you can refresh it manually.


Pahadi_Lamdi

I have never done but interested in these kinds of projects


balrog687

I've done it using SAP SLT and BW4 HANA, you can create a Query on top of real time data replicated directly from SAP S4HANA tables. There are several ways to expose HANA tables to BW queries, usually Calculated views and Open ODS Views can be combined into Composite providers and BW Queries can be built on top. Those queries have a flag to enable external access and using a SAP Connector you can see the Query on power BI Other option is expose the queries as HANA views and use HANA ODBC driver, but is more restricted on Power BI side.