Forum Discussion
Has anyone successfully connected Power BI to a Business Objects Universe
Here is what you need to know at high level about the limitations of Business Objects Connector for Power BI.
http://businessintelligist.com/2014/03/12/what-is-the-microsoft-power-bi-connector-for-sap/
You should not need the Personal Gateway to be able to use the connector. The Personal Gateway's job is to enable refresh of datasets that have been already published to PowerBI.com
Also, right not these are the supported on premise data sources, and Business Objects is not on the list:
- SQL Server
- Oracle
- Teradata
- IBM DB2
- PostgreSQL
- Sybase
- MySQL
- SharePoint List (on-premises)
- File (CSV, XML, Text, Excel, Access)
- On-premises SQL Server Analysis Services Tabular models (uploaded data; not live connections)
- Folder
- Custom SQL/native SQL
Thanks for your interesting reply, it looks like you have saved me a lot of time. I was surprised to see how restrictive this component is and as we have the older version of Business Objects with the older (UNV) universes, this will have no use for us as it currently stands.
I suppose my only options now are to either link to the databases directly (I don't really want to take this route as it is a Progress DB), or to produce excel spreadsheets from BO and connect to these with Power BI.
A bit messy but it would get the job done and I could schedule the excel reports to refresh each day.
Many thanks for your help
- andre
Memorable Member
Actually, connecting to the database directly may not be as daunting as you think. Obviously you would want to leverage existing investments in the semantic model, but you may be able to rebuild the logic very quickly in PowerPivot or Desktop. Extracting to Excel sounds painful.
Unfortunately, although messy, getting BO to produce scheduled Excel reports and using Power BI to produce a dashboard from those is a lot less hassle than trying to persuade the DB supplier to give me access to interigate the DB directly.
I could see a time in the future where something has become corrupted in the DB and the supplier points the finger at Power BI as being the issue.
Hopefully the application will, in the not too distant future, be moving over to a SQL DB, which will make it more accessable.
- andre
Ouch... Well, I am sure that there is a perfectly safe way to access data using either views or read only account that would prevent any corruption to the database. However it sounds like your supplier is a little toxic to work with, I have sure seen my share of those...