Live Data Connections to SAP BPC Embedded

You can create live data connections to SAP Business Planning and Consolidation, version for SAP NetWeaver (SAP BPC for NetWeaver) and SAP Business Planning and Consolidation, version for SAP BW/4HANA (SAP BPC for BW/4HANA) embedded configuration systems using the Direct and Tunnel connection types.

License

In order to write data back to a BPC embedded configuration model from SAC, you will need a planning license (minimum SAP Analytics Cloud for planning, standard edition).

For more information, refer to Features by License Type for Planning Models.

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:

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.
  • Tunnel connection types are not supported on mobile devices in this release.
  • This connection type is not supported in SAP Analysis for Microsoft Office.

  • Currently, this connection type is only supported in the Cloud Foundry environment.

Supported Features and Usage Restrictions

For BPC specific feature restrictions in a live connection, see SAP note 2969947 Information published on SAP site.

In addition to that, there are some usage restrictions and minimum version dependency requirements on BW side, which equally applies to the embedded configuration of SAP BPC:

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