Zoho Inventory Reporting and Star Schemas in OBIEE

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

Connect to Zoho Inventory 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 Zoho Inventory, set the following connection properties:

• OrganizationId: set this to the ID associated with your specific Zoho Inventory organization
• InitiateOAuth: set the to "GETANDREFRESH"
• AccountsServer (Optional): set this full Account Server URL (only when manually refreshing the OAuth token)

The connectors use OAuth to authenticate with Zoho Inventory. For more information, 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 Zoho Inventory Metadata

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

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