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The Gmail ODBC Driver is a powerful tool that allows you to connect with live Internet E-mail (Gmail), directly from any applications that support ODBC connectivity.

Access Gmail folders and message data like you would a database - read, write, and send E-mails through a standard ODBC Driver interface.

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Build Dashboards with Gmail Data in Dundas BI


Create dynamic dashboards and perform analytics based on Gmail data in Dundas BI.

The CData ODBC Driver for Gmail enables access to live data from Gmail under the ODBC standard, allowing you work with Gmail data in a wide variety of BI, reporting, and ETL tools and directly, using familiar SQL queries. This article shows how to connect to Gmail data as a generic ODBC Data Provider and create charts, reports, and dashboards based on Gmail data in Dundas BI.

Connect to Gmail Data

  1. If you have not already done so, provide values for the required connection properties in the data source name (DSN). You can configure the DSN using the built-in Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator. This is also the last step of the driver installation. See the "Getting Started" chapter in the Help documentation for a guide to using the Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator to create and configure a DSN.

    There are two ways to authenticate to Gmail. Before selecting one, first ensure that you have enabled IMAP access in your Gmail account settings. See the "Connecting to Gmail" section under "Getting Started" in the installed documentation for a guide.

    The User and Password properties, under the Authentication section, can be set to valid Gmail user credentials.

    Alternatively, instead of providing the Password, you can use the OAuth authentication standard. To access Google APIs on behalf on individual users, you can use the embedded credentials or you can register your own OAuth app.

    OAuth also enables you to use a service account to connect on behalf of users in a Google Apps domain. To authenticate with a service account, you will need to register an application to obtain the OAuth JWT values.

    In addition to the OAuth values, you will need to provide the User. See the "Getting Started" chapter in the help documentation for a guide to using OAuth.

    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.

  2. Open the Dundas BI interface, open the menu, and click New Data Connector.
  3. Configure the Dundas BI Data Connector:
    • Name the Data Connector.
    • Select "ODBC generic" as the Data Provider.
    • Check the "Use System DSN" checkbox.
    • Select the appropriate System DSN.

Add Gmail Data to a Dashboard

You are now ready to create a dashboard with Gmail data.

  1. Navigate to the Home page.
  2. Click Explore Data.
  3. Expand the appropriate Data Connector.
  4. Drag the relevant data from the Connector to the panel.
    • You can select an entire "table" to add, but you may need to remove Measures/Rows from the Metric Set to build an appropriate visualization. Alternatively, you can select only the fields you wish to include in the visualization.
    • With the fields selected, you can add any filters or conditions on the Measures and Rows, further customizing the visualization.
  5. Click Re-visualize from the menu bar and select the appropriate visualization for the data.
  6. Click Add To New Dashboard to add the visualization to a new dashboard.
  7. Configure the dashboard, creating dynamic visualizations of Gmail data.