Timely Reporting and Star Schemas in OBIEE

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

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

Connect to Timely 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 Timely Profile on disk (e.g. C:\profiles\Timely.apip). Next, set the ProfileSettings connection property to the connection string for Timely (see below).

Timely API Profile Settings

Register an OAuth application through your Timely account under Settings > Devs > New Application to obtain your Client ID and Client Secret.

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 Timely Metadata

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

Ready to get started?

Connect to live data from Timely with the API Driver

Connect to Timely