Import Universe from Different DB

[Former Member]

Hi!

Thanks in advance for taking your time to read this post.

I want to create one mother universe comprising of 3 universes which has separate DBs in their back end. Eg. My univ1 belongs to Oracle, Univ2 belongs to SQL Server and Univ3 belongs to MS Access.

How can i prepare my mother universe without using any other third party tools or data fedarator kind of stuff?

I'm using BO XI Release 2.

My Back End :

For Univ1,

Oracle 10g.

For Univ2,

SQL Server 2005

For Univ3,

MS Access 2007.

Or, Is it at all possible?

Kindly share your thoughts.

If you need any other information, kindly post that here.

Regards.

Satyaki De.

[Former Member]

Satyaki,

Or, Is it at all possible? 
Kindly share your thoughts

I hate to burst your bubble, but no, this is not possible. If you decompose the Universe build process you recall having to set up an ODBC connection for your Universe to its data source. There are no ODBC connector software that permits connecting simultaneously to Oracle and SQL Server (and I'm not sure I'd want such a connector if it did exist). The ODBC connector is key to the process, however, every vendor has a slightly different twist on how their database is accessed. For example, SQL Server uses Pipes and communicates on Port 1433 and Oracle is different. So, in a nutshell, you are "stuck" with three separate Universes, and must use WebI to glue it all together (if possible depending on how your data from one system can relate to data in another system by way of IDs and other such data relations) -- WebI can merge dimensions, but it depends on how the data is structured.

Thanks,

John

[Former Member]

Thanks John,

For your elaborate answer. Really helped.

Regards.

Satyaki De.

[Former Member]

Unless BO enhances its product(s) for one to be able to define multiple connections (pointing to multiple data sources) in one single Universe. This capability was present in Cognos Framework Manager (Cognos' metadata model tool) many years ago.

Another feature I'd like to see in BOE/Universe is to take the connection definition out of the Universe and put it under control of Central Admin Consol. This way in Universe you just use the connection name and needn't to care if it's pointing to production or development database server, as long as the data schema/data structure is the same. This will make the Universe promotion (from Dev to QA to Prod) much easier (I read a few threads in this forum discussion how to import the Universe and connection from Dev to Prod and have to import/open/save the Universe in Prod to change the connection definition for each promotion. This one is also from my Cognos experience.

Not meant to start a fight... I'm pointing these out hoping that if many users find these helpful/important, BO will work on them faster

regards.

Edward

[Former Member]

Thanks for your information.

In Release 2, I'm able to import multiple DB connection in Data View Manager and able to export those data elements for Crystal Report.

But, in Release 3 - i didn't find that tool.

Why is that? Any special reason?

Please share your thought.

Regards.

Satyaki De.

[Former Member]

Any update guys?

Regards.

Satyaki De.