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KelvinGB1's avatar
KelvinGB1
Regular Visitor
11 years ago
Solved

Has anyone successfully connected Power BI to a Business Objects Universe

Has anyone successfully connected Power BI to a Business Objects Universe and is there anything I need to be aware of.   Any hints or tips would be greatfully received.
  • andre's avatar
    andre
    11 years ago

    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
andre's avatar
andre
Icon for Memorable Member rankMemorable Member
11 years ago

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.

KelvinGB1's avatar
KelvinGB1
Regular Visitor
11 years ago

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's avatar
    andre
    Icon for Memorable Member rankMemorable Member
    11 years ago

    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...