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Connecting Report builder to other (not RTC, not IBM) Oracle Databases

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Richard Good
(87●28●61) Apr 11 '19, 5:41 a.m.

Hello,

Ideally I want to connect Report Builder to a Serena Dimensions database and then fire SQL queries at it to return queries as tables for display in Report Builder widgets. Happy to just fire plain SQL statements at this oracle database.

I cannot test whether this would work without playing with firewalls on the RTC server to make sure the RTC process running on the server can see Dimensions oracle server. 

Well worth the trouble if I can do something like this as it could tie history of the old tool to the new tool and use the rather slick Report Builder.

Thanks for any advice

Richard

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Ralph Schoon
FORUM ADMINISTRATOR / FORUM MODERATOR / JAZZ DEVELOPER (63.9k●3●36●48) Apr 11 '19, 6:04 a.m.

Richard,


the Report Builder Administration allows to connect to 
  1. A Rational Data Warehouse
  2. A Lifecycle Query Engine
  3. A Lifecycle Query Engine scoped by a configuration
I would assume that an arbitrary database somewhere is likely not to show up in the choice list above. My many, many years of experience tell me, that applications that work on databases usually make assumptions about the tables and other characteristics and fail if the assumptions are not matched. E.g. RS will make assumptions about how to find project areas and other information when creating a report (even before you start with SQL). There will also be assumptions about where to get the attribute names, Ids and the used data types and formats.
 
This and common sense tells me that it is pretty likely futile to even try. 

1. You can try to create a lifecycle query index server facade for the Serena Dimensions database and configure Report builder to use it.
2. You can see if you could write custom ETL Jobs for the Data Warehouse that pull in the data from the Serena DB. I do not thing this is supported.  

I fail to understand why this is tagged with rational-insight.


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Richard Good
Apr 15 '19, 10:25 a.m.

OK thanks for your reply. Rational Insight was mentioned in a couple of places as being used to connect databases together, I assumed it had been used to build/ design things like the data warehouse, I hope I haven't misunderstood that, if I am right, the ideal responder would be the Rational Insight architect, if I'm wrong it's just another random tag and can be removed if you so desire. 


I was hoping I could use Report Builder in much the same way as you can use Excel to hook in to any sort of datasource. In this sunny day scenario I would not have the front end to play with, but I could type in my sql queries direct and display tables and graphs and maybe in extreme sun, cross reference migrated data to old Dimensions data. My optimism seems to know no bounds ;-). 

Ralph Schoon
FORUM ADMINISTRATOR / FORUM MODERATOR / JAZZ DEVELOPER Apr 15 '19, 10:34 a.m.

Rational Insight is a Cognos based reporting solution. It has been used before Report Builder became available. It is likely that there are ways to create custom ETL Jobs for Cognos to connect different data sources. I would expect that requires knowledge of the source domain and the reporting solution inner workings. Cognos is likely more customizeable, but probably also more complex to use and install. One of the reasons to build Report Builder. There is always a tradeof. 


My experience so far is that it never is as easy as you think 8)  

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Question asked: Apr 11 '19, 5:41 a.m.

Question was seen: 2,507 times

Last updated: Apr 15 '19, 10:34 a.m.

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