From the very beginning, HANA has been shipped with an OLE DB for OLAP (ODBO) driver that allows ODBO enabled clients to connect and analyze analytic views in the HANA repository. Those analytic views are cubes that have been modeled with the HANA modeler (which is part of HANA studio).This blog provides some background and points to a nice demo video that has been created by our partners from Simba.
Excel is an attractive vehicle to take the power of HANA's calculation engine to the end user for ...
- it is ubiquitous on desktop computers, and
- it provides an analytic tool - called PivotTable - that allows simple slicing and dicing and as such some decent analysis capabilities that are available right away due to the ubiquity of Excel.
Technically, Excel generates and issues MDX statements that are submitted via the ODBO protocol to HANA - see figure 1. Native Excel 2007 On Top Of Netweaver BI 7.0 that has provided an ODBO driver for more than a decade.
Figure 1: Excel connecting via ODBO to HANA.
The demo video created by our Simba colleagues shows
- how Excel can be connected to a HANA instance,
- how to pick one of the existing multi-dimensional models (aka analytic views, cubes),
- a simple, albeit powerful example of an analysis on top of that analytic view.
Demo video
Soon, the white paper that is mentioned at the end of the video will be published in SDN. I will update this blog accordingly.