Power BI using SAP BW Application Server

[#1]

Hello,

I’m looking for some hands-on experiences and advice regarding connecting Power BI to SAP BW/4HANA using the SAP BW Application Server connector.

I have tested both Direct Query and Import options, but the performance is extremely poor:

• Expanding the data model takes ~7 minutes

• Selecting the query adds another ~8 minutes

• Only after entering prompts, it takes an additional ~1 minute before I can even start building the report

This makes the development workflow almost unusable.

My questions are:

1. Is this normal behaviour when using Power BI with SAP BW/4HANA via Application Server connectivity?

2. Could this be related to configuration settings on the BW side or Power BI side? I’m testing a connection between Power BI Desktop and SAP BW/4HANA  which is on cloud. 

3. Have you found better performance with Direct Query vs. Import?

I’d really appreciate any real-world experiences or best practices to understand whether this is a configuration issue on our side or simply a limitation of the connector.

Thanks in advance!

Cristina

[orlando_ledezma]

Hi Cristina,

We are using BWOH 7.5 SP25, and we also use PBI as our Visualization standard. We do not present these types of performance issues.

I do have a couple of questions for you:

Are you using Data Import or Direct Query?

If you are using Data Import, have you implemented Query folding?

Are you accessing the data through OLAP or using HANA views?

What are the volumes of data that you are loading to get these times?

Perhaps I can assist you if I gain a better understanding of the scenario.

Regards,

Orlando

[cristina_ungureanu]

Hi Orlando, thanks for your help. We are exploring both DirectQuery and Import through the Application Server (OLAP), but the issue occurs before the data is retrieved. We have many query enabled for OLAP, resulting in a large number of HCPRs and queries. Could the number of objects impact performance?