LDAP Reporting and Star Schemas in OBIEE

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

Connect to LDAP 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 establish a connection, the following properties under the Authentication section must be provided:

• Valid User and Password credentials (e.g., Domain\BobF or cn=Bob F,ou=Employees,dc=Domain).
• Server information, including the IP or host name of the Server, as well as the Port.

• BaseDN: This will limit the scope of LDAP searches to the height of the distinguished name provided.

  Note: Specifying a narrow BaseDN may greatly increase performance; for example, cn=users,dc=domain will only return results contained within cn=users and its children.

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 LDAP Metadata

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

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