Skip to Content
Author's profile photo Matthew Shaw

SAP Analytics Cloud Best Practices for BI Platform Live Universes

SAP BusinessObjects Universes can be acquired by SAP Analytics Cloud as well as connected to in a ‘live’ means. When connecting ‘live’ the data stays on-premise and only metadata is uploaded into the Cloud. You may wonder what are the best practices for Universe design for such a use-case. Look no further!

I’ve just published a wiki that presents the theory and a methodology:

I hope this wiki answer many ‘why’ questions. Your feedback would be helpful! ?

Knowing the theory is all well and good, but sometimes a practical step-by-step guide is also needed. Therefore, I’ve published another wiki to complement the theory using my Auditing Universe as an example.

You can follow this Live Universe step-by-step guide and within a short time use my Auditing universe to build a dashboard like this:

These new wiki’s build on the other ones I created recently for live connections: architecture and process flows.

I’ve also updated my ever-expanding ‘Support Matrix’ with a section dedicated for Universes. The idea of this is to keep the list of known restrictions in one place. (That wiki is still in development)

According to the SAP Roadmap the live connection for Universes is due for some enhancements soon. With the speed of innovation, I will do my best to keep all this material up-to-date! So, it’s best to keep following for updates! ?

As ever, feedback is very welcome. Tell me what you think!

Matthew (Twitter @MattShaw_on_BI)

Assigned Tags

      5 Comments
      You must be Logged on to comment or reply to a post.
      Author's profile photo Deepu Sasidharan
      Deepu Sasidharan

      Great wiki pages!  Keep 'em coming 🙂

       

      Deepu

      Author's profile photo Wolfgang Bidner
      Wolfgang Bidner

       

      Well Thank you for you Input - I had to discover the limitations myself - I am using the CORS Technology. The UNV-Path within the boe.properties file does not work ...

      catastrophic - from My Point of view -  is the fact that the universes are not found by id - but path within the cmc Folders - so any "move" and you loose the dataconnection...

      That's not the old BO-Spirit!

      • Wobi
      Author's profile photo Matthew Shaw
      Matthew Shaw
      Blog Post Author

      Hello Wolfgang

      The 'UNV-Path'. I wonder what exactly you are referring to. Are you referring to the 'Compatible Universe Folder' ? If so, please make sure you've got 'boe.' at the beginning of the line so it reads

      boe.compatibleUniverseFolder=Universes/folder_name_here

      There was a product documentation defect that omitted this, so the result was it appeared not to work. See my screen shot of the right config

       

      The path for the Universe does indeed need to be kept constant. I appreciate it should be by CUID and not by name/path. We're tracking this issue internally (internal reference FPA35-19462). For me the universe path isn't something that changes very often at all, well assuming good use of LCM and different environments for dev/prod etc.

      Thanks for feedback, much appreciated.

      Matthew

      Author's profile photo Wolfgang Bidner
      Wolfgang Bidner

       

      Ah... Thank you Matthew - boe.comp...  was missing. Now it works and helps to make things easier!

       

      Have a nice vaction time!

       

      • Wobi
      Author's profile photo Brian Kudera
      Brian Kudera

      Hi Mathew, thank you for these steps. I started working through the step by step example and your boe.properties file contains a bit more info than other screen shots of this properties file found in many of the other links to the documentation.  I see this properties file indicates it should be pointing to the VM where the WACS server is located.

      Can you explain how this changes in 4.2 SP5 where WACS restful web services has been replaced with TOMCAT restful web services?