:)

How many rows can powerpivot handle?

regards,
Barry

I had the same idea like Jeremy to test the retrieval of data which is provided by SAP BW. No surprise that I also wanted to check this – I am a SAP BI consultant ;-) Don´t worry Rob, I am not an employee of SAP, I am only an independent, self-employed SAP BI consultant. Due to the currently enormous changes/challenges (and the incredibly long lasting confusion) of SAP in the area of the BI frontend tools (BO Tools, new developments such as the new Pioneer frontend which btw partly looks pretty similar to Power Pivot) I am more and more looking for alternatives – out of frustration with the chaotic product strategy. Therefore I had a look on PowerPivot which looks pretty nice, but I also missed the possibility to access the SAP BW. Which is a bit surprising, since SAP BW is increadibly widespread in many big corporations nowadays.

Having checked the Connection a bit more in depth there is good news and bad news.

The good news at first:

There is indeed already a possibility to connect to a SAP BW query. Just go to the button “From Database”, then choose the entry “Others (OLE DB/ODBC)”. A window will open up and there you can see the button “Create”. Hitting this button, another window will open up and there you will see four different tabs. You will start on the second tab which is named “Connection”. But you need to go to the first tab which is named “Provider”. Doing this you will see a list of many different OLE DB/ODBC drivers. If you scroll down, you will see the entry for “SAP BW OLE DB driver”. This is in general one possibilty to connect to the SAP BW system. Of course it presumes that your SAP BW query has been flagged as SAP OLE DB query – which is not the standard when a new SAP BW query is built (not necessary). It is just a flag in the SAP BEx Query designer. If you want to go for this solution, then I recommend to copy an existing query, go to the change mode of the query designer and set this flag. This is all you need to do and then you can use this query for PowerPivot as a dataprovider.
So, up to here everything looks pretty good. Once you chose this entry SAP BW OLE DB provider, you need to to go to the second tab (Connection) and then you go to point 3. Since I am using the German version of PowerPoint I will not even try to translate this point 3. I guess in English it will be named differently from what I believe it might be translated correctly. Anyway, here you choose the drop down box and immediately the famous SAP Logon Screen will pop up, where you need to enter your SAP BW user name and password. Having done this it takes a few seconds and the same drop down box will open up again and offer you all those BW queries which are flagged as OLE DB queries.
From here you should be only a few seconds away from being happy.

But as always in life, there is not only light, but also some shadow. :-(

Now the bad news comes:

Everything works fine up to here. Even if you choose one of the OLE DB capable SAP BW queries, it still looks fine. You confirm then with OK and then PowerPivot will start to work… and work… and work. Then – after some time – the window will freeze and… Shit, Excel will crash. I tried it several times, but it does not work – or let me say: It works all the times very similar – it crashes.

Summarizing all this, it means: Already today PowerPivot theoretically has built in the ability to access the SAP BW by accessing SAP BW queries. The precondition is that those people who are SAP BW query designers in your company make a copy of the query for you, flag it as OLE DB capable query and transport this to the production system. Then nearly everything you need is provided. The only limitation right now is that Microsoft needs to find out, why the PowerPivot including Excel crashes… ;-) Once they found the bug, the solution should work… in theory at least… ;-)

There is currently no possibility to access the SAP BW cubes directly which is really a very pity, because since Release 7.0 there are quite a few different possibilities also to access the cubes directly with 3rd party tools. One possibility is the XMLA interface which originally was developed by Microsoft by the way… :-) and which works fine. We just tried it with another 3rd party tool.

Even if I cannot provide you a working solution right now, I hope that I at least could make clear that there is a potential way to directly access SAP BW data, in case that Microsoft finds out why its product currently still crashes when using the SAP BW OLE DB provider.

Best regards,

Joachim

This is the email I got a while back from our Sharepoint developer.. I already told him just the developer needs the Office 2010/PowerPivot. But knowing us it will still be a few years.. :(

I agree that this could be a powerful tool for enabling users to build some of their own reporting functionality. However, there are a few hurdles to overcome before it can even be seriously considered:
• PowerPivot/Gemini is an Excel 2010 plugin. Office 2010 is still in Beta, and we (WWW) are barely getting onto 2007 over 3 years after release. I am not aware of a WWW 2010 upgrade plan (but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one).
• This functionality relies on Excel Services on a SharePoint 2010 platform
o SharePoint 2010 is currently in Beta and a release date hasn’t even been announced; it is unknown if/when we will upgrade
o Excel Services is an Enterprise licensed feature, meaning that each user that employs the functionality (or has access to a site that has it enabled) must have an additional client access license – current pricing is about $100 per CAL in SharePoint 2007, but pricing hasn’t been announced for 2010 yet

And this also prompted me to post an update letting everyone know about the new Unanswered Questions View.