Technical Articles
Live access to SAP HANA Service from SAP Analytics Cloud
Hi,
A hot topic right now is how can a SAP Analytics Cloud user access HDI Containers of a SAP HANA Service (aka HaaS) instance. In particular how to provide “live” access to data that is changing in real time.
This capability has been formally supported since early 2019 however you’ll need to deploy the HANA Analytics Adapter yourself and authentication must be via SAML 2 Single Sign-On (SSO).
It’s actually pretty straightforward as long as you’ve addressed all of the necessary prerequisites and have your ducks in a row so to speak.
This is what the overall architecture looks like:
We published how-to content on this topic back in 2018 but to align with the recent announcement of formal support we’ve completely revisited the subject and have published eight brand new hands-on video tutorials to our SAP Analytics Cloud – Live Connections playlist.
The first tutorial shows how a given SAP Analytics Cloud user would connect to the SAP HANA Service, create a model and design and publish a story accessing “live” data. Child’s play!
The others go through the required architecture and prerequisites including how to set up SAML2 SSO, how to verify trust, how to configure, build and deploy the HANA Analytics Adapter including installation of client tools used during the process such as the Cloud Foundry CLI, Node.js, Java and Maven, as well as how to set up the necessary authorizations that make the solution secure. Everything you’ll need to go from zero to hero!
You can access the tutorials directly as follows:
- Access from SAP Analytics Cloud
- Architecture & Pre-requisites
- Install Tools
- Configure SAML2 SSO
- Verify Trust
- Deploy Analytics Adapter
- Configure Authorizations
- Additional Sources
- Classical Schema Part 1
- Classical Schema Part 2
- Classical Schema Part 3
- Classical Schema Part 4
The example applications and HDI containers used in the video tutorials are posted to GitHub: HANA Analytics Adapter, Sales, and Students.
If you’re new to the SAP HANA Service then you might want to check out our video tutorial series which should hopefully get you up to speed pretty quickly. This playlist also includes these SAP Analytics Cloud tutorials.
And for SAP Cloud Platform itself we also have an onboarding video tutorial series.
Finally if connecting SAP Analytics Cloud to HANA on-premise is your thing please check out the sibling blog from my colleague Denys.
Good luck and let us know your feedback in the comments section below!
Philip
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The SAP HANA Academy team publish hands-on tutorial videos on all sorts of SAP-related technologies to our YouTube channel. Don’t be fooled by the team name – we’re not only here to spread technical knowledge for HANA – although that’s a large part of what we do!
For the full list of blogs, see Blog Posts – by the SAP HANA Academy
- Subscribe to our YouTube channel for updates
- Join us on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/saphanaacademy
- Follow us on Twitter: @saphanaacademy
UPDATE 10 July 2019: 4 tutorials have been added covering how to access a classical database schema in a SAP HANA Service instance from SAP Analytics Cloud
My colleagues have just published an excellent blog that details this topic in action in order to take advantage of IoT sensor data sourced via SCP Internet of Things for Cloud Foundry. A great scenario. https://blogs.sap.com/2019/07/15/send-iot-data-to-hana-and-connect-it-to-sap-analytics-cloud/
Hello, Where can we found theses 4 tutorials ? Thks
Hello Maxime,
You can find them in the links of the main blog "Classical Schema Part 1 - 4" or directly here:
Thanks,
Philip
Perfect 🙂
Great work Philip. This is really great.
Hi Philip MUGGLESTONE ,
Can I configure HANA Analytics Adapter in trial account?
Hi Misaq,
Yes it's possible in the trial if you use HANA Cloud. Please see the latest blogs and video tutorials (there are 3 with HANA Analytics Adaptor in the title).
Thanks,
Philip
Thanks Philip MUGGLESTONE . I was able to configure HANA Analytics Adapter as per your instructions. Both HearthBeat and GetServerInfo return the correct results. But when creating the connection in SAP Analytics cloud,
I get the error –
I even tried with below in mta.yaml, but no luck.
Hi Misaq,
Not sure what’s going wrong – config looks OK to me.
Have you checked the network log in your browser (more tools > developer tools in Chrome)?
Can you share details of the connection in SAC?
You might want to try this test environment provided by SAP Partner Engineering (use your SAP Identity Provider credentials such as you use to log into SCP): https://a-team-shared-haa-haa.cfapps.eu10.hana.ondemand.com/index.html as it might help pinpoint where your issue lies.
Thanks,
Philip
Hi Philip MUGGLESTONE ,
Now it is thru CORS config and looks good. But it is giving a generic error as below. I did open the console in developer tools and saw this error "Application: (#81) Server metadata was not a structure json"
I got a note but not completely relevant-
https://apps.support.sap.com/sap/support/knowledge/en/2898179
Any suggestions would be helpful.
Hi Misaq,
Take a look at your network log in chrome to see if there's anything more detailed.
It looks like your SAC connection details are correct but what's being returned by HAA is somehow not. You are pointing to the approuter module?
Also try with the Partner Engineering test I mentioned previously.
Thanks,
Philip
Hi Philip MUGGLESTONE ,
The issue got resolved when I opened SAC in incognito mode. I was facing the the similar error appearing in Edge, IE and Chrome. But incognito was the savior.
Thanks for your suggestion, videos and tutorials.