My First look at CMS database data access driver – BI 4.2 SP3 New feature

It has been long time since I wrote blog in SCN due to professional commitments. But I tempted to write a blog after exploring the new features of BI 4.2 SP3.

Thanks to https://scn.sap.com/people/thomas.jentsch  for writing this introduction document to explain the new feature CMS database access driver via BO Open connectivity here https://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-74580 and thanks for your mention of my Query builder blogs too.

Here are few of my findings and observation after exploring this. I hope this should be useful for few other to start building their own custom metadata reports going forward. I will continue to explore this and help others in case of any questions. To those who are looking for more information about BusinessObjects Open connectivity and driver details, the below information will be beneficial.

Yeah. It is easy for me to extract the user list from the repository with out running the QB query or the Excel based macro now. This is impressive. I can keep track of my licence usage easily by simply schedule this webI report to my Inbox every month.

Here is your Query

Now it’s time to concentrate on my BI content. I am going to try for my Universe/Report relationships and Universe/Connection relationships here.

My Query for UNV-WEBI relationship

Similarly you can generate reports for multiple combinations of relationships something like below.

Now it’s time to dig in to properties of each BI content individually. Here you go for WebI.

Finally the most interesting and the essential information for every BusinessObjects Administrator – The security, though it is not showing each granular rights this should help us to build the Security matrix at high level with a clear cut Custom Access Level definition.

Few of my observations:

1. The Current Data foundation has only one table to capture all the metadata properties. You may require creating multiple Aliases as on when you required getting the detailed information about multiple interrelated BI contents.

2. The way How Class/Objects organized in the Business layer is so confusing .In order to understand the current model we may need to do multiple iterative steps to capture/understand the underlying metadata.

3. You don’t need to install the specific driver required for BO OC if you are in BI 4.2 SP3.

4. The number of relationships listed is very limited and might not be useful for complete analysis of all the Repository objects something like User- Inbox & User-Favorites

You can get the list of almost all type of BI content here https://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-42952#start=100 as listed by Dell Stinnett-Christy in Comments section

I understand this is the one among the big leap towards the metadata reporting in BusinessObjects by SAP, Let us add all our thoughts/comments here for enhancement of this feature to make everyone’s life easy.

Thanks for reading and Have a nice Long weekend everyone.

Thanks

Mani