Live Data Connections to SAP BW and SAP BW/4HANA

You can create live data connections to SAP BW or SAP BW/4HANA systems using the Direct and Tunnel connection types.

Direct Connection

Note
To make the direct live connection available to users on the internet, see Direct Live Connections in the Internet Scenario.

The Direct connection using CORS is recommended for these reasons:

  • You will have direct connectivity with no additional devices required. Your browser directly connects SAP Analytics Cloud, your IdP, and backend data sources by securely unlocking the same-origin policy.

  • Because there are no additional devices, a direct connection enables better performance.

  • This configuration is easy to set up.

To use this connection type, you must configure Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) support on your SAP BW system.

Tunnel Connection

You can use the Tunnel connection type if your organization wants to expose some of your data to users outside of your corporate network, without giving them VPN rights.

Example: Giant Bread Company wants to expand their business, so they hire Very Clever Consultants (VCC) to do market research for them. VCC prepares a story with market analysis. VCC wants to safeguard this data inside their own firewall, but provide access to their customer. They don't want to give Giant's executives VPN access to VCC's network, but by providing a tunnel connection, VCC can give access to the report and its data, without compromising their network.

Note that tunnel connections are slower than direct connections.

Note
  • Systems on SAP data centers support only SAML connections, while systems on non-SAP data centers support Basic and SAML connections. A two-digit number in your SAP Analytics Cloud URL, for example eu10 or us30, indicates a non-SAP data center.
  • This connection type is not supported in SAP Analysis for Microsoft Office.

Supported Features with Usage Restrictions

Note

HTTP/2 is supported for SAP BW data sources. This backwards compatible protocol optimizes network and server resource usage to increase performance.

When to use HTTP/2

Measurements show that performance gains can be expected when there are long running queries with multiple widgets.

  • Fast queries (query execution time is 2 seconds or less)

    If there are fast running queries, for example because of OLAP caching, there will be no noticeable difference in the overall story loading performance.

  • Slow queries

    If the query execution time is 3-5 seconds or longer, browser connections would likely stall during story loading (previously, under HTTP/1.1), especially when there are multiple widgets on one page. But utilizing HTTP/2, a performance improvement of 20-30% is expected.

    Use the Number of parallel sessions for BW data sources setting in SAP Analytics Cloud to make sure that the BW server can process the sent requests in parallel (to prevent the backend becoming the bottleneck). However, be aware that higher values for this setting will increase the load on the BW server, so you'll need to ensure that the BW server is configured to handle this load. It might be necessary to increase icm/max_conn and other parameters. For more information, see the following two documentation links.

How to enable HTTP/2

Related Information