Contentful Reporting and Star Schemas in OBIEE

Jerod Johnson
Jerod Johnson
Director, Technology Evangelism
Create a star schema that shows perspectives on Contentful facts in real time.

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

Connect to Contentful 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.

Start by setting the Profile connection property to the location of the Contentful Profile on disk (e.g. C:\profiles\Contentful.apip). Next, set the ProfileSettings connection property to the connection string for Contentful (see below).

Contentful API Profile Settings

Obtain your Content Delivery API access token from your Contentful space settings under Settings > API Keys. Your SpaceId is visible in your Contentful workspace configuration.

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 Contentful Metadata

Follow the steps below to use the OBIEE Client Tools to import Contentful metadata into an OBIEE repository. You can then integrate Contentful 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 Contentful tables.
You can now create star schemas based on Contentful tables:

Ready to get started?

Connect to live data from Contentful with the API Driver

Connect to Contentful