Add JSON Services to Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog

Informatica provides a powerful, elegant means of transporting and transforming your data. By utilizing the CData JDBC driver for JSON, you are gaining access to a driver based on industry-proven standards that integrates seamlessly with Informatica's Enterprise Data Catalog. This tutorial shows how to classify and organize JSON data across any environment.

Load the JDBC Driver

To load the JDBC Driver:

1. Install the JDBC Driver on the host running Informatica. For this article, it is assumed that the driver was installed into cdata.jdbc.json.JSONDriver.

$ java -jar setup.jar

2. Navigate to the JDBC install directory and create a zip file called genericJDBC.zip containing the driver and its license file.

$ cd ~/cdata-jdbc-driver-for-json/lib
$ zip genericJDBC.zip cdata.jdbc.json.jar cdata.jdbc.json.lic

3. Move the genericJDBC.zip file into the Catalog Service directory within Informatica. For this article, it is assumed that Informatica is installed into /opt/informatica. Working in this folder will probably require root permissions, so make sure to su or sudo to root before continuing.

# mv genericJDBC.zip /opt/informatica/services/CatalogService/ScannerBinaries

4. Edit the custom deployment configuration to unpack the zip file.

# cd /opt/informatica/services/CatalogService/ScannerBinaries/CustomDeployer/
# nano scannerDeployer.xml

After unpacking the existing ExecutionContextProperty nodes, add a new ExecutionContextProperty node with this content.

<ExecutionContextProperty
 isLocationProperty="true"
 dependencyToUnpack="genericJDBC.zip">
<PropertyName>JDBCScanner_DriverLocation</PropertyName>
<PropertyValue>scanner_miti/genericJDBC/Drivers</PropertyValue>
</ExecutionContextProperty>

5. Refresh the Catalog Service from the Admin console.
👁 Refresh the Catalog Service from the Admin console.

Configure the JDBC Resource

To configure the JDBC resource:

1. Open the Catalog administrator and add a new JDBC resource with the following properties:
• Driver Class: cdata.jdbc.json.JSONDriver
• URL: jdbc.json:URI=C:/people.json;DataModel=Relational;

See the Getting Started chapter in the data provider documentation to authenticate to your data source: The data provider models JSON APIs as bidirectional database tables and JSON files as read-only views (local files, files stored on popular cloud services, and FTP servers). The major authentication schemes are supported, including HTTP Basic, Digest, NTLM, OAuth, and FTP. See the Getting Started chapter in the data provider documentation for authentication guides.

After setting the and providing any authentication values, set to more closely match the data representation to the structure of your data.

The property is the controlling property over how your data is represented into tables and toggles the following basic configurations.

• Document (default): Model a top-level, document view of your JSON data. The data provider returns nested elements as aggregates of data.
• FlattenedDocuments: Implicitly join nested documents and their parents into a single table.
• Relational: Return individual, related tables from hierarchical data. The tables contain a primary key and a foreign key that links to the parent document.

See the Modeling JSON Data chapter for more information on configuring the relational representation. You will also find the sample data used in the following examples. The data includes entries for people, the cars they own, and various maintenance services performed on those cars.

Built-In Connection String Designer

For assistance in constructing the JDBC URL, use the connection string designer built into the JSON JDBC Driver. Either double-click the .jar file or execute the .jar file from the command-line.

java -jar cdata.jdbc.json.jar

Fill in the connection properties and copy the connection string to the clipboard.

👁 Using the built-in connection string designer to generate a JDBC URL (Salesforce is shown.)


When you configure the JDBC URL, 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.

Typical additional connection string properties follow:

JDBC;MSTR_JDBC_JAR_FOLDER=PATH\TO\JAR\;DRIVER=cdata.jdbc.json.JSONDriver;URL={jdbc:json:URI=C:/people.json;DataModel=Relational;};

2. Username: user
3. Password: password

Note that the Username and Password properties are required, even if the driver you are using does not require them. In those cases, you can enter a placeholder value instead.

👁 Add a new JDBC resource (Couchbase is shown).

4. Configure the metadata options to perform at least one source metadata scan. This scan uses the driver to determine what tables, views, and stored procedures are available through the service.
• Source Metadata: Enable this option.
• Catalog: Set this to the appropriate catalog for multi-catalog data sources. Otherwise, set this to CData.
• Schema: Set this to the appropriate schema for multi-schema data sources. Otherwise, set this to the name of the service (for example, Couchbase).
• Case-sensitivity: Generally this option should be disabled. Enable it only for data sources which are case-sensitive.
• Import stored procedures: Enable this if you want to import stored procedure definitions in addition to tables and views.
👁 Configure the source metadata settings (Couchbase is shown).


Other metadata scanners may be enabled as desired.

5. Complete the driver configuration, optionally configuring custom attributes and a scanner schedule.
6. Perform the metadata scan by navigating to the Monitoring tab and clicking Run. Depending upon the data source, this may takes a few minutes.

When the scan is complete, a summary of all of the metadata objects is displayed along with the status of the Metadata Load job. If any errors occur, you can open the Log Location link for the job to see the errors reported by Informatica or the driver.

Validate the Discovered Metadata

Open the Catalog Service browser to view the metadata extracted from the data source. Depending upon the options you selected when configuring the metadata scanner, you may see any combination of tables, views, and stored procedures for the resource you defined.