Changing the Data Source of a Query

Objective

After completing this lesson, you will be able to map objects to a new data source

Change Source

Changing the data source is useful in the following scenarios: 

  • When you move from a test universe into production and want to use the same documents on the new universe.
  • When you change between universes covering different functional areas but based on the same database.

An organization can have a marketing universe and a sales universe, both based on the sales database. The marketing universe uses objects for companies, contacts, leads, and promotional efforts. The sales universe uses objects for companies, contacts, sales orders, and sales revenue.

The marketing managers want to know how many of the contacts you established during a promotional campaign led to sales within the six months following the campaign.

With appropriate access to the sales universe, the managers can make a query that retrieves the companies and contacts that participated in the campaign. They can also change the data source from the Marketing to the Sales universe, add the Sales revenue object from the Sales universe to the query, and filter to retrieve data for the six-month period following the campaign.

Changing the data source of a document is no longer limited to Universe, SAP BW and SAP HANA data sources. In SAP BI 4.3, you can do it even for query based on a Web Intelligence, Excel, Text or Free-Hand SQL data source. The target query can be another existing query or a query created on the fly on a Universe, an SAP BW or an SAP HANA data source.

When you click QueryChange Source in Design mode, you can select any query from the document in the Select a Query dialog box. In previous releases, you could only select a query based on a universe, SAP BW or SAP HANA.

Change source: See the text before and after the image for more details.

Then, in the Change Source dialog box, for the target query, you can select the:

  • Choose an Existing Data Source from the Document radio-button to select another query of the document.
  • Specify a New Data Source radio-button to create another query. The Select a Data Source dialog box opens but only with the Universe, SAP BW and SAP HANA options. For other data source types, you need to first create the target query before running the Change Source and then select Choose an Existing Data Source from the Document radio-button to select this query.
Change source wizard: See the text before and after the image for more details.

For Excel, Text or Free-Hand SQL data sources, it is recommended to use this Change Source functionality rather than the Change Path. This is especially true when the two data sources differ since you can explicitly map objects; which cannot be done through the Change Path.

Change Source Supported Paths

The following table lists the data source options supported by the Change Source Wizard:

Change wizard data sources - part 1: The table lists the data source options supported by the Change Source Wizard.
Change wizard data sources - part 2: The table lists the data source options supported by the Change Source Wizard.

Note

(1): Relational and OLAP UNX universes, including HANA HTTP (InA) UNX universes.

(2): HANA Direct Access based on HANA Relational and OLAP connections, including HANA InAconnections.

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