Certinia Reporting and Star Schemas in OBIEE

The CData ODBC Driver for Certinia is a standard database driver that can integrate real-time access to Certinia data into your data warehouse or directly into your reporting tool. This article shows how to bypass the data warehouse and import operational Certinia 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 Certinia Data as a Remote Oracle Database.

Connect to Certinia 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.

There are several authentication methods available for connecting to Certinia: login credentials, SSO, and OAuth.

Authenticating with a Login and Token

Set the User and Password to your login credentials. Additionally, set the SecurityToken. By default, the SecurityToken is required, but you can make it optional by allowing a range of trusted IP addresses.

To disable the security token:

1. Log in to Certinia and enter "Network Access" in the Quick Find box in the setup section.
2. Add your IP address to the list of trusted IP addresses.

To obtain the security token:

1. Open the personal information page on certinia.com.
2. Click the link to reset your security token. The token will be emailed to you.
3. Specify the security token in the SecurityToken connection property or append it to the Password.

Authenticating with OAuth

If you do not have access to the user name and password or do not want to require them, use the OAuth user consent flow. See the OAuth section in the Help for an authentication guide.

Connecting to Certinia Sandbox Accounts

Set UseSandbox to true (false by default) to use a Certinia sandbox account. Ensure that you specify a sandbox user name in User.

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 Certinia Metadata

Follow the steps below to use the OBIEE Client Tools to import Certinia metadata into an OBIEE repository. You can then integrate Certinia 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 Certinia tables. 👁 Tables to be imported into the repository. (Salesforce is shown.)
   

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