As per SAP’s Statement of direction, SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) is SAP’s primary app design solution moving forward. SAP Lumira Designer mainstream maintenance is available only until December 31, 2022, and then only priority one support maintenance is available till December 31, 2024. Since all new innovations and enhancements will be delivered only via SAC, SAP recommends SAC for all future application design needs. One of the key factors to consider when migrating from Lumira Designer to SAC is its performance while consuming live data from on-premise SAP BW on HANA and SAP Enterprise HANA systems.

In this blog, we will compare the performance of SAC Analytics Designer with Lumira Designer when consuming live data from on-premise systems.

Furthermore, we will look into performance best practices like Query Batching for a fully rounded cloud experience with SAC.

Versions: SAC 2020.17, BOBJ 4.3, BW 7.5, and HANA 2.0

SAP Lumira Designer vs. SAP Analytics Cloud – BW Live data connection

SAP Lumira Designer has been the go-to tool for custom application development in the BI space for quite some time. So, we replicated an SAP Lumira Designer application in SAC’s Analytics Designer for performance comparison.

The Lumira Designer application that has been developed in version 2.2 consists of 2 tabs and 7 data sources that were created on BW queries. All the data sources are loaded during the initial load in 3 processing Groups. The total data size is 1763 cells (collectively of all the data sources).

In SAC, a CORS connection has been established to SAP BW. The same BW queries are accessed using a Live connection. All the features are replicated in SAC and when we compared the performance, the Analytic Application created in SAC took 8 to 10 seconds to load the application while originally, the Lumira Application took about 24 to 30 seconds. SAC was clearly ahead of Lumira Designer with over 100% improvement in performance.

We can see the load time of SAC’s Analytic Application compared to the SAP Lumira application below.

SAP Lumira Designer vs. SAP Analytics Cloud – HANA Live data connection

For this study, we replicated an SAP Lumira Application in SAC’s Application Designer using HANA Live connection. The HR Analysis Lumira dashboard has been built on version 2.2.

The application has a total of 6 data sources and 5 are loaded when the application is launched. The total number of cells from all the data sources is 14230. Data sources are created on top of views through the gHANA HTTP connection. The Dashboard has around 10 charts and is driven by month and quarter selection.

SAP HANA has been connected to SAC through a CORS connection.

When both the reports were run, SAC rendered the application in 8 to 10 seconds while SAP Lumira Application took 25 to 29 seconds.

In BW and HANA, SAC has shown a consistent performance superiority when compared to SAP Lumira Designer.

A quick comparison of SAP Lumira Designer vs. SAC based on the applications’ time is shown below. Based on the observation, SAC is at least twice as fast as SAP Lumira Designer (BOBJ 4.3).

SAC also offers additional performance improvement features, like the ones offered in Lumira Designer.

Performance improvement features offered by SAP Analytics Cloud

When developing a multi-tab application with many widgets, we can load the widgets that are not required to be shown on the launch in the background. This can be done in Analytic Application Settings.

With respect to queries, if we have several queries in an Analytic Application, running them in parallel will reduce the time. Under Query Settings, the application developer can enable Query Batching and specify the maximum and a minimum number of queries per batch. The minimum and the default value is 4, and the maximum value is 20.

We also have an option specific to BW live queries. We can merge the requests sent to the BW server. The queries from multiple charts are automatically combined based on common objects. This is available under Query Settings in the Story.

To conclude, SAC performs better when compared to SAP Lumira Designer in the observation. As per this study and observation, SAC performs betters than Lumira Designer. Creating and designing widgets with performance in mind and using performance improvement settings like Query Batching will have added benefits to enhance the performance.

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Click here to talk to our experts about SAP Analytics Cloud. To know more about the Analytic Applications of SAP Analytics Cloud, please check out our blog series here.