Impala Reporting and Star Schemas in OBIEE

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

Connect to Impala 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.

In order to connect to Apache Impala, set the Server, Port, and ProtocolVersion. You may optionally specify a default Database. To connect using alternative methods, such as NOSASL, LDAP, or Kerberos, refer to the online 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 Impala Metadata

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

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