Reporting off SAP BI

Any improvement made in RS 2008 to reporting off SAP BI data sources?

Just a comment.

The Microsoft .NET Data Provider 1.0 for SAP NetWeaver BI (SSRS 2005) had similar weaknesses like I mentioned earlier in one of my postings:

Integration between SSRS and SSAS:

http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2003837&SiteID=1

Here is another usefull URL:

Using SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services with SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence

http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/e/a/5ea7ee4f-479c-471e-848f-43269a8ee683/UsingRSwithSAPNetWeaver.doc

P.S. I am a bit surprised by the silence of the Microsoft folks on the subject.

Regards,

Yitzhak

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An updated version of the white paper (with troubleshooting) is at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb508810.aspx.

And yes, SAP BW is treated much the same as Analysis Services.

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Thanks for all the replies.

I was tasked to compare SAP BEx Analyzer with Reporting Services. Not being a straight OLAP client makes it hard to convince my manager that Reporting Services matches BEx (just have to do it different ways).

Basically we want it to be able to display reports as the Cube Browser of Analysis Services. We find Reporting Services lacking support in hierarchies, free characteristics, restricted key figures, and certain parameter type(s) - selection option (not sure about precalculated values set). The connection to SAP BI data sources improves over time (not sure why). At the beginning of my test, it was extremely slow and got interrupted by (500) Internal Server Error especially at initial loading. The last I tested, these issues seemed to have disappeared; somehow, it took at least 1 minute to load a SAP BI report that based on an SAP BI MultiProvider or QueryCube (based on an MultiProvider) to run, which is not ideal.

Not much an MDX user, I hope Reporting Services can be upgraded to handle OLAP data sources in a more straighforward manner in future releases.

Regards

Hsiao

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We are making some incremental enhancements to the SAP BW query designer. Support for the SAP Key Figures structures, ability to see the technical names for objects, and performance enhancements in the metadata browser will all be in the 2008 version.

If you have specific bugs with the provider, you can report them at the connect.micrososft.com site and we will take a look.