OBIEE and Vertica

[Drew]

I know nothing about Oracle BI (OBIEE) and Vertica. But because I'm technical I've been tasked with finding out the answer to the following question:
Can we use Vertica instead of Oracle as the back-end of our OBIEE environment?

I turn to the experts. Thank you.

[id10t]

HI!

From ORACLE:

any JDBC client can easily made a JDBC connection with the BI Jdbc driver.

so it can be connected via JDBC for example, but how it will work? It's a good question.
Try ask on OBIEE forums about connecting clients. Looks like ODBC also should be supported.
Also it will require additional database for meta repository: MS SQL, Sybase or ORACLE,
physical Excel files, MS Access or ESE, i.e. - "Hello MS Windows!" Why not Calc or Base
(Excel and Access)from ORACLE Open Office that runs on MS Windows too?

PS
Take one more - forget about any optimization , but it is common situation with BI Tools and Vertica.
(I know only about MicroStrategy optimization). But I'm not expert, just wanted to help.

[Fernando]

Well, regarding the JDBC connection, I have to modified certain JSBC code to adapt my application, because the Vertica JDBC 5.1 JDBC driver doesn't allow result sets backward, only forward. May be this limitation was removed in later versions.
In any case, ussaly Vertica if faster tahn Orace by far, in the order of at least a magnitude.
Fernando Vizer

[id10t]

Hi!


Also ODBC have inner issue and require modification.
HP Vertica has one OEM client in Israel that connected OBIEE to Vertica and I know that there were problems and Vertica provided something for solving it.
Check it - ask for a case study if has.

[bfeeny]

Its been a while since this thread has been commented on.

Has anyone been successful in finding out if anyone is running OBIEE with Vertica? I would be interested in any of the challenges you are facing, and anything that had to be done to get them to play nice together.

[obieetraining2013]

HI sKwa,
you gave a really nice quote on "JDBC Connection".Thanks for information.

[kaja78]

Its been a while since this thread has been commented on.

Has anyone been successful in finding out if anyone is running OBIEE with Vertica? I would be interested in any of the challenges you are facing, and anything that had to be done to get them to play nice together.

We are testing Oracle BI with Vertica as datasource. There were no problems with OBI 11g and Vertica on Windows using Vertica ODBC driver.

We had to properly configure ODBC to prevent some character encoding issues with OBI 10g on HP-UX. Following steps are required to use Vertica as OBI (10g) data source on HP-UX:
1) Install Vertica ODBC driver
2) edit [ORACLE HOME]/OracleBI/setup/odbc.ini:

Code: Select all

[ODBC]
...
#Use UTF-8
IANAAppCodePage=106


...
[Vertica]
Description=VERTDB Database
Driver=/opt/vertica/client-7.0.1/lib64/libverticaodbc.so
Database=VERTDB
Servername=[vertica hostname]
UserName=
Password=
Port=5433
DriverStringConversions=NONE
Label=OracleBI

3) edit [ORACLE HOME]/OracleBI/setup/vertica.ini:

Code: Select all

[Driver]
DriverManagerEncoding=UTF-8
# reference to the DriverManager, looks not necessary if the library is on search path
ODBCInstLib=/oracle/product/OracleBI/odbc/lib64/libodbcinst.so
ErrorMessagesPath=/opt/vertica/client-7.0.1/lib64
LogLevel=4
LogPath=/tmp

4) Define ODBC datasource in OBI repository. Play with database features tab to use full potential of Vertica database in OBI generated queries. (The "Ask DBMS" is insufficient. Add at least GROUP_BY_EXPR_SUPPORTED, EXPRESSIONS_IN_ORDERBY_SUPPORTED. May be you can check all, and then fix problems by unchecking problematic features...).