The Trouble with SAP Data Warehouse + Analytics Cloud

The integration between SAP Data Warehouse Cloud and Analytics Cloud is a funny thing (tl;dr: it’s a feature)

Having been an early adopter of SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) in 2017 and having guided many clients through their initial dashboard projects, I thought I knew the ins and outs of the various integration issues.

For example, a customer can expect certain functionalities of SAC to be available when paired with a HANA data warehouse live-data connection and a subset of features are available when paired with a Business Warehouse (BW) or S4HANA (S4) source system.

Regardless of the source system, the process is the same for a Live Data Connection. That’s not the case with Data Warehouse Cloud (DWC).

For example, the pattern for building a story (ie dashboard) is to first build a mode, where you essentially replicate the metadata of the BW, HANA, or S4 model or view. The above screenshot is typical of process whether the live data connection is BW, HANA, or S4 (see steps 1 and 2)

Where things take a strange turn when is you have a SAC tenant connected to a DWC tenant. See the error message in step 3.

Creating a model in SAC based on a Live Data connection to DWC is not possible and is a product design (see SAP Note 3029387). The model is not visible in the file system for SAC but is instead created in the background when building a Story or Analytics Application. SAP refers to these as ghost or private models. 👻

Assuming your Data Warehouse Cloud model is exposed for consumption in the Data Layer or Business Layer, you can access that model by consuming it directly in a SAC story.

Here are the steps.

This is a round-about way of getting to your DWC model but hopefully, this article saves someone a bit of time and hassle searching the SAP forums for an answer. 😁