SAP Analytics Cloud provides you with the ability to blend information from multiple sources. For example, you could leverage data from SAP BW and join your actual data with your forecast that is coming to you in form of a Excel spreadsheet and then create a combined view and leverage this combination in charts or tables.
SAP Analytics Cloud provides two main approaches: Browser based Blending and SDI (Smart Data Integration) Based data blending - or to use different terms, client side vs server side.
Browser Based Blending
Browser based Blending is normally recommended for scenarios where you don't need to combine large data set, but instead the focus is more on smaller data sets.Browser based blending doesn't require any additional hardware, nor does it require any additional setup.
But browser based blending has its limits in regards to the data volume:
These are the browser-based blending limits on aggregated sets of data:
- SAP BW Live connections: up to 6 MB in dataset size
- S/4HANA live connections: up to 6 MB in dataset size
- SAP HANA live connections: up to 2 MB in dataset size
In case the data volume limit has been reached and therefore the blending operation can't be complete, the user will receive a warning message.
Currently the following scenarios are supported for browser based blending:
- Blending data from a BW Live connection with imported data
- Blending from SAP S/4HANA Live with imported data
- Blending from a Live HANA connection with imported data
To enable the browser based blending in SAP Analytics Cloud:
- In case of a SAP BW or SAP S/4HANA Live Connection, please ensure the latest SAP Notes are applied. See SAP Note 2737952 for further details on SAP BW 7.5 and see SAP Note 2737953 for further details on SAP BW4/HANA.
- In case you are running SAP HANA, please ensure that you are on on SAP HANA 2.0 SPS02 Patch 5 or higher, with EPMMDS version 1.00.201815.00.1534765831 or higher.
See SAP Notes 2456225 and 2444261 for further details.
SDI Based Blending
In case you do have the need to blend larger data volumes and you see the need to go beyond the limits mentioned above, you can configure the SDI (Smart Data Integration) based blending for SAP Analytics Cloud. In this case you will configure the SAP Data Provisioning Agent and point the Data Provisioning Agent on the one hand towards your SAP HANA environment and on the other hand towards your SAP Analytics Cloud environment.
In addition to the data volume, the SDI based blending also supports additional scenarios.
Here for example the list of scenarios for the BW Live Connectivity:
- Blending SAP BW live data models with import data models: A live data model based on SAP BW can be blended with one or more secondary models based on imported data.
- Blending SAP BW live data models with other SAP BW live data models:
- Multiple BW models from the same BW system
- Multiple BW models from different BW systems
- Blending multiple models (more than two)
- Blending multiple models using acquired data with multiple BW models
- Support both browser-based and SDI blending modes
- Use BW systems with different release cycles (for example, BW 7.5 and BW/4HANA)
- Linking with and without hierarchies (parent-child hierarchies only)
- Use BW as the primary data source
In regards to the setup for SDI based blending, we will go through those steps in the next blogs.
SAP Analytics Cloud – Blending information (Part 1)
SAP Analytics Cloud – Blending information (Part 2)
SAP Analytics Cloud – Blending information (Part 3)
SAP Analytics Cloud - Blending Example
