Sage 300 Reporting and Star Schemas in OBIEE

The CData ODBC Driver for Sage 300 is a standard database driver that can integrate real-time access to Sage 300 data into your data warehouse or directly into your reporting tool. This article shows how to bypass the data warehouse and import operational Sage 300 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 Sage 300 Data as a Remote Oracle Database.

Connect to Sage 300 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.

Sage 300 requires some initial setup in order to communicate over the Sage 300 Web API.

• Set up the security groups for the Sage 300 user. Give the Sage 300 user access to the option under Security Groups (per each module required).
• Edit both web.config files in the /Online/Web and /Online/WebApi folders; change the key AllowWebApiAccessForAdmin to true. Restart the webAPI app-pool for the settings to take.
• Once the user access is configured, click https://server/Sage300WebApi/ to ensure access to the web API.

Authenticate to Sage 300 using Basic authentication.

Connect Using Basic Authentication

You must provide values for the following properties to successfully authenticate to Sage 300. Note that the provider reuses the session opened by Sage 300 using cookies. This means that your credentials are used only on the first request to open the session. After that, cookies returned from Sage 300 are used for authentication.

• Url: Set this to the url of the server hosting Sage 300. Construct a URL for the Sage 300 Web API as follows: {protocol}://{host-application-path}/v{version}/{tenant}/ For example, http://localhost/Sage300WebApi/v1.0/-/.
• User: Set this to the username of your account.
• Password: Set this to the password of your account.

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 Sage 300 Metadata

Follow the steps below to use the OBIEE Client Tools to import Sage 300 metadata into an OBIEE repository. You can then integrate Sage 300 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 Sage 300 tables.