Using Excel on SAP HANA… the inside scoop from SAP’s Thomas ZurekOctober 18, 2011 by Amyn Rajan in Big Data Business Intelligence Excel Pivot Tables MDX Multi-Dimensional Data Connectivity OLAP OLE DB for OLAP XML for Analysis XMLA
Thomas Zurek, VP for R&D of SAP BW and analytic parts of SAP HANA, just posted a blog about Using Excel on HANA. This is important information on SAP HANA. Basically, SAP HANA supports queries using the MDX language. You can send MDX queries to HANA using the ODBO Provider. HANA does not yet support XMLA, but it would be natural to expect this sometime soon. Just like SAP BW has supported the MDX query language from day one, so does HANA. What is key to note is that in his many presentations, SAP CTO Vishal Sikka has shown various applications connecting to HANA. In all the hype about new applications on HANA, what has often been overlooked is that Excel can connect directly to HANA without requiring anything else. What Thomas Zurek points out is that you can use your Excel Pivot Tables to directly analyze your data in HANA. The power of this solution should not be overlooked when considering how easy it is to do these analytics. From your Excel desktop, you get the full power of HANA to crunch your data.