Connecting Lumira (and Design Studio) to your very own HXE environment
In my last blog I wrote about how to get content from the web, load it into HXE and do some text analysis on it:
Web scraping and text analysis: test driving the HANA Express Edition
Today I would like to show you how to create a calculation view on top of my loaded StackOverflow data (table), connect it to Lumira and create a story.
You need some additional rights
In order to make use of a calculation view, you will have to grant select rights to your schema holding your data. In my case (as I am lazy 😉 ) I use the SYSTEM schema which is part of my SYSTEM user. Open a SQL console and fire away:
GRANT SELECT ON SCHEMA SYSTEM TO _SYS_REPO WITH GRANT OPTION
That’s all you need to do.
Next, do the regular modelling you would always do in Eclipse: create a package and a calculation view.
Do a Data preview if you want to check your result:
We have data!
Connecting to Lumira
As of Lumira 1.30 you can connect to HANA with a local connection over HTTP or HTTPs. In order to do so, you need the host name (hxehost if you mapped the IP address of HANA to the Host file in Windows) and look up the port via the adminstration console in Eclipse.
Normally you would need the SQL port of the indexserver, but because we are using a HANA Multitenant Database Container (MDC) system and are logging into the SystemDB, there is no indexserver running. In fact you need the nameserver. You can read up on MDC and server components here:
Server Architecture of Multiple-Container Systems – SAP HANA Administration Guide – SAP Library
HXE SystemDB:
Port 30013 is what we need.
Open up Lumira and make your connection:
Et voila, you’re running a BI data mart in HXE!
Create your story and your off to your very first cool dashboard on your own HANA kit:
So what about Design Studio?
I have been trying to use the Ina connection, but came to the conclusion that it simply does not work in the SystemDB, I believe it only works in Tenants which we do not have. No fear however, ODBC still works like a charm.
Install the HANA Client tools (software download section on service.sap.com) and configure an ODBC connection in c:\windows\system32\odbcad32.exe:
Your connection will automatically show up in Design Studio and you’re all set:
Go UI5 rockstars, keep answering those questions!
Ronald.
Thanks for this post! It's a great starter for me.
As you know, I'm a HANA newbie but am hitting HXE hard to learn what I can. Would creating a Tenant DB be out of the scope of reasonability to try to attempt in the HANA Admin Cockpit? Perhaps I should take a VM snapshot before I totally screw up my instance 🙂
Good one Mike..., I think we should raise the issue with "issue: no issue" again in a new question in the HANA dev space here on SCN. Create a tenant might be a solution but a bit of a heavy one (performance would not get better I reckon)
Hey Ronald,
I managed to do it. I created a second Tenant DB, and then added new WebDispatcher entries for a host alias called hxehost2 using this document:
SAP HANA Administration Guide - SAP Library
It seems that xsengine runs in the index server for tenant DB so no other changes I had to do besides this.
There's also a very helpful post on SCN I found here, however I did not have to instantiate a new XS Engine, but it's very deep post.
Exposing HTTP access to multitenant database containers in SAP HANA SPS09
Nice to see a tenant indeed works!
Hi Ronald,
I have an issue working in the same scenario. My SAP Lumira doesn't found any calculation view in HANA HXE, but with PowerBI I can see the view.
In my HANA Sidecar works fine too, the error is just happening in the HANA HXE.
Is there any tip/recommendation to do it ?
See the image below:
Hello there!
I noticed the same. In Power BI Desktop I can see my calculation views. All of them under my package. However, in Lumira 1.31.4 the ones using SQL scripts do not show up.
Another thing, in Power BI Desktop I can drag a NChar attribute as Value into my charts. In Lumira currently I can not. I know we can convert an attribute to a measure, however that option is only available when we "import from" SAP HANA. On the other hand, Power BI allows it using DirectQuery.
Moreover, SAP Lumira does not allow "Cross Chart filtering". Guess What?! Feature by design in Power BI.
Honestly, I hope SAP Lumira 2.0 combined with SAP Design Studio brings some flavor into it. As of now Power BI seems to have more capabilities.
Hello Faian,
I would recommend to use "Download from HANA" or "Connect to HANA" instead of "Query with SQL". these connections should list all the calculation views.
for Live connections to HANA, in Lumira 2.0 we use HTTP Connector instead of JDBC (other tools) which enables us to delegate calculations and support most of the metadata and semantic defined in HANA. even here NChar would be considered as dimension to respect the semantic defined in the source. However, we plan to provide enrichment capabilities in the future releases.
Lumira 2.0 inter-operability between Discovery and Designer enables to extend the core capabilities of Discovery by simply extending in Designer e.x. Cross chart linking
Ramu.
Hi Gowda, Im also trying to use the Live connection, but are not able to connect can you please send some word on how you did the connection? Here are some thing that is not clear to me:
Hope you have time to help me 🙂
Br
Petter
Hello Petter,
Please reffer to following blog for details https://blogs.sap.com/2017/06/10/sap-hana-live-analysis-with-lumira-2.0-an-overview/
Regards,
Ramu.