Published SAP HANA Data Sources on Tableau Server May Fail During Connection or Extract Refresh

Issue

When connecting to published SAP HANA data sources, or refreshing published SAP HANA extracts, the connection/extract may fail with errors including:

"[SAP AG][LIBODBCHDB DLL][HDBODBC] Communication link failure;-10709 Connect failed (no reachable host left)" when refreshing SAP HANA data source.

Environment

Tableau Server
SAP HANA

Resolution

Edit the password to remove special characters other than underscores ("_").

Cause

Even though SAP HANA allows passwords with special characters, passwords using special characters other than an underscore ("_"), need to be contained in double quotation marks ("). Some SAP HANA clients automatically cast passwords with special characters in quotation marks, such as SAP HANA STUDIO. Many other clients do not have this ability built in, including SAP HANA HDBSQL.

So, even if a user can connect to SAP HANA STUDIO with the same credentials, passwords with special characters may not get passed properly through Tableau Server as a result.

Additional Information

Details about SAP password requirements can be found here Password policy Configuration Options (scroll down to the "password_layout" section).

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