The Power BI connector for SAP HANA uses the SAP ODBC driver. SAP Business Warehouse Application/Message Server Connector.Two built-in SAP connectors available in Microsoft Power BI (Sep 2018) SAP BW/4HANA Connectivity Options in Power BI With the data gateway, you can keep your dashboards, reports and data sets refreshed, on an ad-hoc basis or a scheduled interval. Power BI gateway acts as a bridge, providing quick and secure data transfer between SAP data, and the Power BI service.Moreover, you can connect to your data sources in two different ways: you can import a copy of the data into Power BI Desktop, or you can connect directly to the data in its original source repository, which is known as DirectQuery and is further outlined below. It can connect to SAP BW/4 or SAP HANA environments. Power BI Desktop enables you to acquire and prepare data using its built-in query capability.Business users can enjoy the benefits of up-to-date data with real-time, automatic and scheduled refreshes. You can build dashboards that provide a single consolidated view of business. The Power BI service provides access for business users to interact with their data.Main components of Power Bi are displayed in below picture. Microsoft Power BI is a business analytics service that gives you insights using live dashboards, create rich interactive reports and access your data on the go, from your mobile devices. In this blog, will focus on Microsoft Power BI as front end tool. Please refer my previous blog – SAP BW/4HANA – Data Warehouse with Three Approach Strategy for Business Intelligence Reporting and Analytics. It does not include front-end solutions anymore, as was the case with SAP BW 7.x (BEx front ends). SAP BW∕4HANA is a data warehouse solution which is highly optimized for the SAP HANA platform.

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