The adapter is extended to support SAP customers running on IBM iSeries (EBCDIC). Support for IBM iSeries requires the installation of the RFC 640E SDK (SAP Note 450870). For information on which iSeries OS/400 versions have been released, refer to SAP Notes 156557 and 392165. Support for customers running the new SAP NetWeaver RFC SDK is targeted for a future release.

Multiple Adapter for SAP data source connections can be defined with more that one type of user ID/password, cookie, password/passthru or trusted credentials.

For example, if the SAP or BW datasource connection is explicit, you can use user ID/password. If the SAP or BW connection uses password passthru and a user ID and password has been provided, you can use user ID/password. Otherwise, if a MYSAPSSO2 cookie is present, you can use the MYSAPSSO2 cookie.

SAP has introduced a new set of OLAP BAPIs that support requests with more than one million instances per axis. The SET USE_RSR_MDX command enables the Adapter for SAP BW to take advantage of these new BAPIs.

In order to support requests with more than one million instances per axis, the following SAP Note is required:

SAP Note 1232751 - MDX: Result contains too many cells

ENGINE BWBAPI SET USE_RSR_MDX {OFF|ON} 

The Adapter for SQL Server Analysis Services supports the key performance indicator (KPI). This includes a new record in the Master File with the following syntax:

KPI=KPI_NAME, CAPTION=KPI_CAPTION, 
KPI_STATUS_ICON='KPI_STATUS_GRAPHIC', 
KPI_TREND_ICON='KPI_TREND_GRAPHIC' 
 {,PARENT=KPI_PARENT_KPI_NAME} ,$

Each key performance indicator may have up to five fields, only the PROPERTY=KPI_VALUE field is mandatory. Each field references the key performance indicator with a distinct property.

User-Defined Attributes (UDAs) are properties that are represented by Master File fields with the attribute PROPERTY=ATTRIBUTE. They correspond to SSAS metadata entities defined in the MDSCHEMA_PROPERTIES Rowset for hierarchies and their levels. In the Business Management Studio, these entities are created as Attribute Relationships that link attributes comprising hierarchy levels to other related attributes. Examples of such property/attribute relationships could be Color and Net Weight for Product, or Address, Phone Number, and Gender for Customer.

By default, SSAS creates a separate attribute hierarchy for each dimension attribute. The members of these hierarchies contain aggregated values for distinct values of the attribute. Some of these aggregations might or might not have business sense. For example, aggregation of Sales Amount by Customer Gender might make sense, while aggregation by Phone Number does not.

Within the current implementation of the Adapter for SSAS, a BY clause determines the level at which aggregated data is extracted from a cube. Therefore, if COLOR is a field referencing the Color UDA, the BY COLOR clause causes individual members of the Product hierarchy level to be extracted. It is equivalent to BY COLOR BY PRODUCT NOPRINT.

To see values aggregated by Color, you can reference the Master File field that was created for the corresponding level of the Color attribute hierarchy. However, this might be inconvenient for the following reasons:

• By default, attribute hierarchies are not included in a Master File. If you want them to be included, you must click the Include System-Enabled Hierarchies check box at synonym creation time.
• If, at synonym creation time, the user requests inclusion of attribute hierarchies, the Master File can become very large and difficult to present visually.
• There is no visual link between a hierarchy level and the related attribute hierarchies.

If you issue the adapter SET USE_ATTRIBUTE_HIERARCHIES ON command, the adapter automatically interprets references to UDA fields as references to the corresponding attribute hierarchies. Therefore, although the attribute hierarchies are not included in the Master File, the adapter will use them to retrieve the aggregated measure values when a request references the UDA resulting from the attribute relationship created for this attribute.