Install Metabase and connect to ERPNext to analyze data
Hey there! In one of my last blog posts, here, I set up an Open Source ERP system called ERPNext that keeps track of all important business processes. To analyze all this data a dedicated Business Intelligence [BI] system is the best choice. There are many BI systems out there. Popular ones include Tableau, PowerBI or SAP Analytics Cloud for the SAP users out there. These tools typically cost money so a popular choice among cash strapped startups is Metabase. It is an easy to use dashboarding tool that can be hosted anywhere, connects to the most common databases and has a free license available that comes with the most important features to get started. You can also choose to pay for a hosted version or for additional features like single sign on. Below I explore how to install it on a Linux VM and connect it to ERPNext.
Set up and run a remote function call on a BW system with pyRFC
Hey there! It can be hard as a Data Scientist in a BI organization that uses SAP BW as the main data warehouse technology. All these hard earned python skills are useless when your data is locked up under a layer of application written in ABAP, SAP’s proprietary language.
Local setup with the manual installation option and some playing around with ERPNext.
Hey there! Imagine you have a small retail business and its the busy season of the year. You would probably like a system that keeps track of and helps to plan the goods on stock, your sales, no. of employees and their assignments, the expenses you have etc. This is what an ERP, Enterprise resource planning system does. It tracks and helps you plan your flow of goods, value, the usage of your capital etc.. Technically its a transactional system designed for OLTP, that is industry jargon for online transactional processing. A system designed for concurrent inserting and updating data in mostly relational databases. In my other blog posts I was playing around with SAP BW an OLAP, or online analytical processing system. In contrast to the OLTP an OLAP system is designed for complex queries to a huge number of records and mainly read access. OLTP systems are built for a balanced read/write access scenario to a small amount of data.
Creating an OData service from a SAP HANA table in my SAP BW/4
Hey there! Imagine you want to offer your carefully modelled data in your SAP BW to non-SAP tools. The BW4/HANA provides you three ways how to do this (SAP Reference):
OpenHub - Replicate data from the BW by writing it to databases or files
Via the HANA database itself by generating HANA views (For how to access the HANA from Python see my last blog, link)
Reading data from Hana into Python and analyzing BW objects in Python
Hey there!
Although I haven’t written about it, I continued my learning journey in my self hosted BW/4 system. In this post I will connect my favorite Data Science tool, Python, with BW/4’s underlying database HANA. I will read out the metadata describing the data objects I have created and quickly visualize them to show you my progress. This can come in handy when we want to analyze the data model in our BW/4 platform e.g. the re-usage of InfoObjects, i.e. MasterData.
Hey there!
I attempt to learn SAP BW/4 in a day. As with any tool my preferred way of learning is hands-on. So I will set up a BW/4 and model some data objects. This is not necessarily meant as a tutorial to follow along. I will certainly make mistakes and meet some dead ends. Anyways I am sure it will be fun! So follow me along on my attempt to learn BW in a day.
