Selecting Tables for Relational Sources

When you are creating a connection to a relational source data source, you can include all available tables or a subset of the tables in your data source connection. You can also choose to include all available views, alias tables, and synonyms, or a subset of those objects. Once your selections are made, Essbase Studio scrapes the data source for table, column and join information.

Note:

In this procedure, “tables” refers to tables, views, aliases, and synonyms.

Note:

For Oracle BI EE data sources, this procedure is used with Presentation Layer sources only (not with Business Model sources).

  To select tables for a relational data source connection:

  1. In the Select Tables page of the Connection Wizard, click one or more of the buttons to the left of Available tables to control the content displayed in the Available tables box:

    • Show tables

    • Show views

    • Show aliases

    • Show synonyms

    These button are toggled. Click a button again to stop displaying a particular group of tables. For example, if you had clicked Show views to display database views, click Show views again to stop displaying them.

  2. Optional: Enter a Filter to limit the tables displayed in Available tables, and click Apply.

    For example, if database tables are prefixed for a certain business area, such as “perf” for Performance, enter a filter to return only those tables in that area, such as:

    perf*

    Filters apply to all tables, views, aliases, or synonyms you have chosen to display.

  3. Perform an action:

    • Select the tables you want to include in the data source connection, and click the Add selected tables to data source button.

      The tables you selected should appear in the Tables in Data Source box.

    • Click the Add all tables to data source button to add all tables to the Tables in Data Source box.

      All tables should appear in the Tables in Data Source box.

  4. Optional: Remove tables from the Tables in Data Source box by performing one of the following tasks:

    • Select the tables you want to exclude from the data source connection and click the Remove selected tables from data source button.

      The tables you selected should appear in the Available Tables box.

    • Click the Remove all tables from data source button to remove all tables from the Tables in Data Source box.

      All tables should appear in the Available Tables box.

  5. Optional: Select Lock catalog during exploration to prevent other users from writing to the catalog database during the data source creation process.

    Note:

    Because data source creation involves database scraping, you may not want other users adding, modifying, or deleting source or metadata elements until the process completes.

  6. Click Next or Finish.

    Note:

    Clicking Next or Finish begins the data source scraping process. If you have selected a large number of tables to add to the connection, the data source scraping process can take several minutes.

    Clicking Next takes you to the Select Minischema page of the wizard, described in Selecting a Minischema Option for Relational Sources.

Note:

If you later decide that you want to add tables to a data source that contains only a subset of tables, you may do so by performing an incremental update of the data source. See Performing an Incremental Update of Data Source Connections.