Explaining Where the Data Comes From

SAP Analytics Cloud enables access to both on-premise and cloud data sources via either live or import connectivity – two ways of accessing your data located anywhere in your information-system landscape.

Depending on your environment, there are different requirements for establishing live and import data connections to SAP Analytics Cloud. For more information, see the System Requirements and Technical Prerequisites Guide

You must decide which connection type your organization needs, based on your user requirements. As you evaluate which connection type to use, consider the following criteria:

• Functional needs
• Data privacy constraints
• Data volume constraints

It is possible that you will need a combination of both live and import connections, and SAP Analytics Cloud makes satisfying that requirement very easy to support and manage.

Connection Screen

On the Connection screen, an administrator creates and maintains data source system connections. Connections are categorized as either a live connection or an acquired data connection. It is also possible to filter the list of available connections by data source type or by category.

The following figure shows the connection screen in SAP Analytics Cloud.

You can create models from data sources in on-premise or cloud systems without any data replication. Live data models do not support any data transformations or model-based calculations. However, creating calculations in a story that uses a live model is possible. Live models are typically used when:

• You need data in a story that is real-time.
• You do not need to transform or calculate the data in SAP Analytics Cloud.
• You cannot have data on the cloud due to security or privacy considerations.

Data access for the model is controlled by the source system security, not SAP Analytics Cloud security.

Currently, the data sources for live models are limited to SAP systems and include:

• SAP BPC Embedded - Connect to a configuration model.
• SAP BW - Connect to a BW query.
• SAP HANA - Connect to a HANA view.
• SAP S/4HANA - Connect to a query or CDS view.
• SAP Universe or WebI document - Create a universe query or connect to an existing Web Intelligence document.

As with live models, you can create models from data sources in on-premise or cloud systems; however, with acquired data, the data is imported (copied) to SAP Analytics Cloud from the source system. This replication allows the imported data to be transformed/manipulated and/or additional calculations created. Import models are typically used when:

• Data in stories does not need to be real-time.
• Source system performance issues preclude the use of live models.
• You need to transform data.
• You need to combine data from multiple source systems.
• You need model-dependent calculated measures.
• You need to submit planning data.

One very important consideration is that changes made to the data in the source system do not affect the imported data. Because of this fact, imports from sources systems can be, and typically are, scheduled to occur on a regular basis. However, if data is imported from a file into a model, the import cannot be scheduled.

Data access for the model is controlled by SAP Analytics Cloud security.

There are many data sources for imported models, both SAP and non-SAP.