Connecting to the SAP HANA database
SAP HANA supports various connectivity choices. These can be categorized as follows:
BI Consumer Services (BICS): This is the SAP Proprietary interface that offers advantages for OLAP access over MDX on multidimensional reporting objects.
Open Database connectivity (ODBC): This is widely used across the industry. Database requests are made via SQL.
Java Database connectivity (JDBC): This is mostly popular with the Unix platform used for relational reporting
ODBO: OLE DB for OLAP-MDX, multi-dimensional expression, is used to send the request
The following illustration shows the different connectivity options supported for frontend tools connecting to SAP HANA: