Anyone implement with SAP?

rkehoskie

Has anyone implemented Domo with SAP? I would be interested in how you are getting your data to Domo.

Thanks

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kshah008

Hi all,

Can anybody provide some insight to @rkehoskie?

Thanks!

alexpeay

@rkehoskie which SAP product are you trying to connect to? Depending on the product there may be different ways of getting your data in.

plimbacher

The Domo team was very helpful when trying to get us set up with our SAP connection. They offered several suggestions.

Our exisiting landscape consists of SAP Production (with test and development instances as well) and then a BW instance. The BW instance received data from Production once daily (orders, invoices, backlog, inventory, POs, etc.). We had been, and still do, using the BEx netweaver front end to view reports, BEx analyzer, BEx Broadcastor etc. But no great visuals there; hence our addition of Domo.

So, we came up with the following solution to pass data to Domo:

SAP Production --> SAP BW (daily) --> Network folder --> Domo Workbench pulls and sends .csv files via Schedule --> Domo

Step 1: SAP Production to SAP BW (existing functionality for us)

Step 2: SAP BW batch job to export .CSV files of key data (orders, sales, backlog) to network folder on the SAP BW server (new functionality for Domo integration)

Step 3: Domo Workbench is loaded on BW server. We created a seperate USER ID in DOMO called 'SAP Administrator', created the API string in Domo and then use this USER ID for the connection in the Domo Workbench. By having the Domo Workbench running on the BW server we insure it is always running. Some minor data clean up occurs here (new functionaliy for Domo integration) as it sends data to Domo.

Step 4: Cards and dataflows point to datasets of our SAP BW data.

For us the 'once daily' view of data from SAP Production via BW works. We know the SAP BW data is accurate and consistent because we already had that existing process. We could have pulled data direct from SAP Production, but had concerns about data consistency. We had already established and validated all the data in BW for many years now; we just needed a simple process to get it over to DOMO. It's been working without any issues for about 9 months now.

Hope that helps!

kshah008

@rkehoskie, tagging you to check out the latest replies.

jstan

Hi @rkehoskie I know this was posted a few years ago, but I thought I would add how we get SAP data in. We are using a CDATA ODBC driver to connect to SAP (ECC tables) and might soon use SAP HANA. For large tables to pull in history, we sometimes use BODS to extract the files to CSV or a SQL Server and then upload them to Domo and switch to the CDATA ODBC driver for daily updates.

Pros:

CDATA ODBC driver is super easy to use
Anyone with SQL knowledge can write queries
Can use Workbench to schedule jobs, leaving only one point of failrue for jobs
Can use Upsert jobs with workbench to eliminate duplicates in SAP datasets, making pulls a bit more easy as long as there is some date field on the table

Cons

It is slow and every 100,000 additional rows gets slower and slower becuase it uses the RFC Read Table function (and natively limited to 512 characters per row without a custom funciton)
Domo Workbench does not play nice with dates and timezones with the CDATA driver (we had to set our server to UTC time)
No joins with transaction tables (can be done with small tables, but large tables over 500K rows don't work well) - you can use the Domo lookup table function in workbench to do joins of reference tables with the SAP tables.
You are building the data models in Domo, there is nothing pre-built
Support from CDATA is not great - there is no dojo either, so getting user feedback is impossible

Feel free to reach out with any quesitons and I am willing to have a call with you to show you how we do everything. We have about 6B rows across 500 datasets for SAP.

deefalcon

Hi @jstan I am having a lot of trouble finding out how to successfully connect my SAP database to Domo for visualization.

Can I take you up on the call offer above?

deefalcon

Hi @jstan I am having a lot of trouble finding out how to successfully connect my SAP database to Domo for visualization.

Can I take you up on the call offer above?