SAP Business Warehouse is an OLAP database that exposes data as cubes, which you query with multidimensional expressions (MDX). The server models these cubes in relational views that you can query with SQL-92 or MDX.

Accessing Cubes as Views

SAP Business Warehouse is fundamentally different from a relational database. As a result, the server does not support many SQL-92 features found in a server for an RDBMS. To bypass any limitations with query translation, you can submit pass-through MDX queries from the server.

See Retrieving SAP BW Data for query limitations and more information on querying SAP Business Warehouse.

Modeling Views Dynamically

You can query all of the cubes in your SAP Business Warehouse instance. When you connect, the server retrieves the metadata from SAP Business Warehouse and displays the available dimensions and measures as columns for the views (cubes). The server dynamically updates the schemas over subsequent connections.

Instead of retrieving metadata every connection, you can set CacheLocation.

Accessing Schema Information

Query the System Tables to access schema information and other server metadata.