HANA Visualisation on a MAC!!!…while waiting on Lumira.

All…

Just to clarify, I have no affiliation with any of the software vendors and the blog is a result of a painful struggle with VM’s on a Mac, just so I can consume HANA data in a visually pleasant way. I do have Lumira, but that is not Mac friendly and I so wish that it was (there was a beta program but seems to have died…).

Anyway, I saw somewhere that Microstrategy Desktop is now available for free…and free stuff gets my attention, so I had a go. The download for a Mac installer was as per usual (had to fill in some contact details) and the installation involved extracting from a zip file and then launching the installation.

So far no issues…

There are numerous data sources that are supported and I will not list them all, but will rather focus on the HANA connection:

Select ‘Database’ and then SAP HANA:

Fill in connection details

and fight the disappointment….

However, all is not lost.

Now, this is just a personal workaround and I am not sure if officially supported or endorsed. So use at own discretion.

The issue is a missing jdbc driver and the connection will not work without it. After digging around a bit, I found that a jdbc driver is delivered with the HANA client installation i.e. if you have the client installed on a Windows system then you can grab it from there (needs the 32 bit client). So back to my VM:

grab the ngdbc.jar file and store somewhere on the Mac i.e. desktop.

Open up Microstrategy and edit the HANA connection that was initially created, else create a new one and select the ‘Add driver’ link:

select the driver file to install.

And here we go, connection to HANA now works:

You can now select the columns and proceed to creating visualisations either as a live connection or an import into Microstartegy.

I will stop here as the aim was to share that Mac users can now have an alternative and free way of consuming HANA data and creating visualisations locally without the need for a VM.

To be clear, I am a paid up Lumira customer, but the fact that it does not play with my Mac is disappointing. Will make the switch if/when Lumira opens the door again.

Kris