Oracle Business Intelligence Beans Sample

BI User Community Synchronization with RDBMS

Overview

The BI User Community Synchronization with RDMBS Sample demonstrates how to bootstrap and synchronize users and groups in a given BI Beans Catalog with users and roles in a given Oracle RDBMS.

Contents

This document explains the sample and also does the following:

Assumptions

A discussion of administrative tasks, such as creating and deleting users and groups and changing attributes, is beyond the scope of this document. This document and sample assume the following:

Related information

For additional information on the topics that are discussed in this document, consult the following resources:

Users and the BI Beans Catalog

Types of users

In this document, the application user is the person who invokes a BI Beans application. The application user is also referred to as the BIUser in this document and in the BI Beans Help topics. The administrator is the person who executes the scripts to add users to the BI Beans Catalog and is the audience for this document and sample. In this document, the term subject generically refers to a user or to a group.

Adding users to the BI Beans Catalog

The BI Beans Catalog is the only BI Beans component that requires user credentials. Although the BI Beans Catalog does not perform any authentication of its own, it does ensure that the user exists in the user tables in the Catalog before allowing access for that user. Therefore, you must add users to the user tables before the users can connect to the Catalog. Applications seeking connections to the Catalog must supply user credentials in the form of BIUser.

You can add users and groups to the Catalog in one of the following two ways. Use either one of these ways, but not both.

Bootstrapping and Synchronizing Users

Bootstrapping users

When the BI Beans Catalog is newly installed, it contains only one user, namely the database user that installed the Catalog. You must add users to the user tables before any users can connect to the Catalog.

Bootstrapping is the process of adding multiple users to the Catalog from an externally managed user community. The scripts that are provided with this sample allow you to bootstrap users from an external RDBMS. You should bootstrap before synchronizing users.

Synchronizing users

After most of the users have been bootstrapped, you should periodically ensure that the users in the Catalog match those in the external user repository, which in this sample is an RDBMS. Synchronization is the process of updating the user tables in the BI Beans Catalog with the changes made to the user or group information in the RDBMS. Such changes include the creation of new users and groups and the updating of user and group identities.

For example, if a new user has been added to the RDBMS after the bootstrapping has occurred, then the synchronization script detects that addition and imports the new user to the Catalog. The script can also detect and synchronize changes to the membership of a user. The scripts also handle deletions of users or groups from the Catalog when users or groups are deleted in the external community.

Unidirectional synchronization

The scripts that are provided with this sample perform only a unidirectional synchronization. That is, the scripts are intended only to bootstrap and synchronize users from an RDBMS to the BI Beans Catalog. The scripts are not meant to work in the opposite direction. The RDBMS is considered to be the centrally managed source for user and group identity.

The Sample Scripts

Using scripts for bootstrapping and synchronization

The BI User Community Synchronization with RDBMS Sample contains the following sample script that you can use to bootstrap and synchronize the users in the BI Beans Catalog with the users in the RDBMS:

Guidelines for running the scripts

Before setting up to run the scripts, bear the following points in mind:

How the scripts handle entries

Before running the scripts, you should understand how they handle entries from the RDBMS, as described in the following list:

Running the Scripts

Before running the scripts

Update the scripts with user information that pertains to your Catalog and RDBMS as follows:

  1. Modify the rdbms_sync.bat and rdbms_sync.csh files.

    For the command: sqlplus bibcat/bibcat@ashtmp @rdbms_sync.sql

    Change bibcat to the username of the Catalog owner, bibcat to the password for the Catalog owner, and ashtmp to the connect string to the database that contains the Catalog.

  2. Modify the rdbms_sync.sql SQL script.

    For the line: create database link rdbms_link connect to system identified by oracle using 'ashtmp';

    Change system to the username of the RDBMS which has DBA priviledges, oracle to the password of that user, and ashtmp to the connect string to the RDBMS.

Entering the commands that run the scripts

Complete the following steps to run the scripts:

  1. From a UNIX command prompt, use the following command:

    rdbms_sync.csh

    from a Windows/DOS command prompt, use the following command:

    rdbms_sync.bat

  2. When you have finished running scripts, log out of SQL*PLUS, using a command such as the following one:

    sqlplus>exit

Process Flow

Description


Copyright © 2004 Oracle Corporation.
All Rights Reserved.