Pentaho Report Designer - Dynamic Data Sources

Question

I have a local instance of the Pentaho Report Designer running on my box and it has a local development database configured as its data sources. (2 datasource configs, both pointing to the same local data server; source and target databases.)

Obviously, when I publish this report to the production BI server the reports fail because my local datasources are no longer reachable.

Clearly configuring the report to rely on the production databases would resolve any identity crisises (crisi?) but I live in the sticks so network is slow and I don't want to impact the production DB for development purposes.

In Kettle, I have updated the kettle.properties file to provide localized datasource variables (Great for unit testing my transformations!) and was wondering if there is a similar method for localizing variables in PRD?

Answer 1

In PRD, you use JNDI connections to have the same sort of abstraction. You can find the JNDI configuration in $HOME/.pentaho/simple-jndi. Create a datasource there and a datasource with the same name in the BI-Server's admin-console. Then define your connection as "JNDI" connection type and mention that name you given your datasources.

Then, depending on whether you run local or on the server, the engine will lookup the connection info from the runtime context.

But one warning: Given the fact that SQL is not a real standard, make sure that your local and remote environment use the same database type. Otherwise, if you - for instance - use MySQL on the client and Oracle on the server, your SQL created for MySQL will not be accepted by the oracle driver and vice versa.

Answer 2

On Windows you find the jndi config file here:

C:\Users\(username)\.pentaho\simple-jndi