Amazon S3 Reporting and Star Schemas in OBIEE

The CData ODBC Driver for Amazon S3 is a standard database driver that can integrate real-time access to Amazon S3 data into your data warehouse or directly into your reporting tool. This article shows how to bypass the data warehouse and import operational Amazon S3 data into Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE).

See the knowledge base for ODBC integrations with ETL tools like Informatica PowerCenter. For an ETL solution into Oracle Warehouse Builder, use the driver with the Oracle ODBC Gateway to Access Amazon S3 Data as a Remote Oracle Database.

Connect to Amazon S3 as an ODBC Data Source

If you have not already, first specify connection properties in an ODBC DSN (data source name). This is the last step of the driver installation. You can use the Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator to create and configure ODBC DSNs.

To authorize Amazon S3 requests, provide the credentials for an administrator account or for an IAM user with custom permissions. Set AccessKey to the access key Id. Set SecretKey to the secret access key.

Note: You can connect as the AWS account administrator, but it is recommended to use IAM user credentials to access AWS services.

For information on obtaining the credentials and other authentication methods, refer to the Getting Started section of the Help documentation.

When you configure the DSN, you may also want to set the Max Rows connection property. This will limit the number of rows returned, which is especially helpful for improving performance when designing reports and visualizations.

Import Amazon S3 Metadata

Follow the steps below to use the OBIEE Client Tools to import Amazon S3 metadata into an OBIEE repository. You can then integrate Amazon S3 data into your business models.

1. Open the Administration Tool and click File -> New Repository.

2. In the Connection Type menu, select ODBC 3.5 and select the CData DSN.
3. Select the metadata types you want to import under the Relational Sources option and then select Amazon S3 tables. 👁 Tables to be imported into the repository. (Salesforce is shown.)
   

You can now create star schemas based on Amazon S3 tables: 👁 Fact and dimension tables. (Salesforce is shown.)