Business Information Warehouse for SAP (Prima Techs SAP Book Series)

Earlier in this chapter, you learned about ODBO and its SAP BW implementation limitations. To overcome such limitations, SAP has enhanced its ODBO interface in BW 2.0. One such enhancement is the ability to call ABAP routines and to have access to query variables. The exact details are still sketchy on how the ODBO interface could be used to access ODS in SAP BW 2.0. The ODS tables in SAP BW are not multidimensional. They are simple, flat tables. How ODBO MDX implementation can be used to interact with tabular data is still being worked out.

The SAP ODBO BAPI is similar to the MDX Query language. Each set of BAPIs represents ODBO specifications with one exception: the schema, as shown in Figure 15-11.

Figure 15-11: SAP BW ODBO BAPIs.

One can develop OLAP applications using BAPI programming in RFC SDK. These BAPIs prefixed with the OLAP_API_ name have several function calls. The following lists some of the function modules in SAP BW 2.0A:

• OLAP_API_BROWSE_CATALOGS

• OLAP_API_BROWSE_CUBES

• OLAP_API_BROWSE_DIMENSIONS

• OLAP_API_BROWSE_HIERARCHIES

• OLAP_API_BROWSE_LEVELS

• OLAP_API_BROWSE_MEASURES

• OLAP_API_BROWSE_MEMBERS

• OLAP_API_BROWSE_PROPERTIES

• OLAP_API_BROWSE_VARIABLES

• OLAP_API_CREATE_COMMAND

• OLAP_API_DELETE_COMMAND

• OLAP_API_EXECUTE_COMMAND

• OLAP_API_FS_GET_DATA

• OLAP_API_GET_AXIS_DATA

• OLAP_API_GET_AXIS_INFO

• OLAP_API_GET_BAPIRETURN

• OLAP_API_GET_CELL_DATA

• OLAP_API_GET_DATASOURCEINFO

• OLAP_API_GET_ERROR_MESSAGES

• OLAP_API_GET_MESSAGE_HELP

• OLAP_API_GET_NAMETAB

• OLAP_API_GET_SELECT

• OLAP_API_RESOLVE_NAMES

• OLAP_API_SET_COMMAND_TEXT

A few vendors have implemented their OLAP applications using this OLAP API instead of using BAPIs. inSight from arcplan is implemented by using OLAP API to build powerful analytical solutions.