Monthly Archives: August 2005

Perhaps I'm mistaken on BizGres

I wasn’t exactly flattering to GreenPlum in this blog. I basically said that anything interesting they were doing was going to be in their MPP (commerical) instead of BizGres (Open Source). I’ve just looked (not used, just read in the docs) at the features for BizGres 0.7 and there are some interesting features in there.

  • Bitmap Index Scan Performance Enhancement
  • Table Partitioning
  • KETL – extract, transform and load (ETL) technology from Kinetic Networks
  • JasperReports from JasperSoft

Again, too busy at the mo’ to have a look although would love to see what the KETL is all about. We’ll see what the uptake and community acceptance is… It’ll be interesting to see what happens with the new three way partnership between Jasper/Kinetic/GreenPlum as well.

Pentaho Milestone 2 release

Since I probably piqued some interest with this blog, I figured I should post an update…

The folks at Pentaho have released some actual software. I’m head deep in an OWB Paris project so I’ve had ZERO time to have a look. I’d love for anyone who’s had a look to email me and let me know their impressions.

From their release briefing:

Using this release, you will be able to experience the streamlined install process and interact with a number of components and samples.

  • Reporting
    how to run reports, burst different content to different users, and parameterize reports.
  • Business rules
    how to include and use business rules in the creation and delivery of content.
  • Email
    how to send the results of a business rule or report creation to an email address, and how to do email bursting.
  • Printing
    how to print a report to a selected printer, how to do batch printing, and how to print bursting (applying different report parameters to individual printers).
  • Workflow
    how to initiate a workflow and pass parameters to it.
  • Bursting
    how to deliver customized versions of a generic report to different email addresses or printers
  • Scheduler
    how to schedule the actions of the Pentaho BI Platform
  • Web Services
    how to access the actions of the Pentaho BI Platform using web services
  • Navigation
    how to organize and describe content to users using Java Server Pages or portlets  

    • Many of the visual features such as wizards – you may have heard discussed or seen demonstrated are not scheduled for delivery until the next milestone release. Please bear this in mind as you use the product.

Using a different schema than username in OWB

It’s not uncommon to set up a special Oracle account to access data in another schema. This is common practice and a good practice, especially when it comes to reporting users.

You want to give a reporting user a limited view of the system; only SELECT access on known interface tables or only SELECT on tables in exactly one other schema. This helps protect the usually powerful schema owner (ACTUAL_SCHEMA) from being widely disseminated. This won’t be new to any bayon blog readers.

The question is:

How does one set up an OWB Oracle Data Source Module (ACTUAL_SCHEMA) that uses one username and password (LOW_PRIV_USER) for authentication but access the objects needed (ACTUAL_SCHEMA)?

The answer is:

You can’t in OWB 10gR1, but you can in OWB 10gR2 (in beta). Note: OWB Product Management emailed a solution in 10gR1 (see below)

I’d love to be wrong, so if anyone would like to send along a solution I’d be happy to post it here.

I reviewed the link area (for importing metdata), nothing! Ok, so perhaps it’s just for metadata. It’s not the end of the world as long as we can register when a different username/schema pair.

However, you can’t register using a different schema than the user either.

Last thought was to try and “Configure” a location, but you can’t do that.

I’m starting to sound like an Oracle employee, but the next version is great. This whole process was a snap with Paris.

If anyone has figured out how to do it in 10gR1 please email me and let me know.

UPDATE: The way to accomplish this in OWB 10gR1 is to configure the mapping to not use the LOCATION but to use a custom DBLink or schema prefix instead. I’ll try it and add a screenshot of this process, but basically this allows you to override the location for every mapping. Thanks Nikolai!

RSS and Paris Project

Did anyone notice that with the upgrades to the forums on OTN, there are now RSS feeds for forums and threads? What a welcome addition to the forums! Add the RSS for the Warehouse Builder forum to your RSS reader.

I’m head deep in a project building a new Data Warehouse with Paris. I’m getting to use even more areas than I had when I was just “kicking the tires.” I’m hoping to post some more findings over the next few weeks on volume, scalability, configuration, deployment, etc.