SAP HANA connector in Power BI is available in two modes – Multidimensional and Relational. Let’s look at the Pros and Cons of both these modes.
Pros of Multidimensional Mode:
- Performance is good.
- Can connect to multiple data sources in Import mode.
- Parent child hierarchy is supported.
- SSL is supported.
Cons of Multidimensional Mode:
- Composite modeling is not supported in Direct Query mode – which means more than one HANA view cannot be used as the data source in Direct Query mode.
- Cannot add calculated columns in Direct Query mode.
Pros of Relational Mode:
- Performance is good when connecting to simple HANA views with few columns and joins.
- Can add calculated columns in Direct Query mode.
- Composite modeling is supported.
Cons of Relational Mode:
- Performance is not optimal when using larger, complex HANA views.
- Parent child hierarchy is not supported.
- SSL is not supported.
- Non-additive measures do not work as expected (as explained here).
Overall performance using multidimensional mode is much better than relational mode.
Although Multidimensional mode has a few drawbacks, new features and enhancements are focused on multidimensional mode. So, my recommendation is to use multidimensional mode.
business intelligist 
Hi, did you find a way to get composite-models working with hana as a source? I didn’t found a way to do this, “Table Mode” is always greyed out to “import” for me. I use a custom sql query to get hana data, but also tried by selecting objects from hana analytic views….
The MS docs list still hana as not supported for composite models so i wonder if you have any insights on that?https://businessintelligist.com/2019/04/08/sap-hana-connector-multidimensional-or-relational-mode/ So i
Composite modeling is supported when you use HANA in relational mode. By default the connector uses Multidimensional mode.