Reg: Connecting Kafka Using OBIEE

Question

Hi Everyone,

How to connect Kafka using OBIEE to pull data and generate report, can any one share the details/resource.

Thanks In Advance,

User_JZKI6 · Answer

Hi Gianni/Christian,

Thank you for the response.

We need to connect Kafka from OBIEE or DV either from RPD or by using direct database request to access the kafka real time data.

As you mentioned in the above post, can you please let me the approach for creating JDBC driver to connect kafka. We are trying with the below link not able to make it up. Any help is appreciated.

https://www.cdata.com/kb/tech/kafka-jdbc-obiee.rst

OBI version we are using OBIEE 12.2. 1.4 and OAS as well

Thanks in Advance,

[Deleted User] · Answer

+1 to Gianni. Take 3 steps back and think about what you're asking and start by drawing a picture of what you're trying to achieve.

Also: You tagged your question "obiee11g" - If you're really on 11g still, then you may want to think about upgrading first. The replacement for 11g - 12c - as released in 2015 and 12c itself has already been replaced since several years now.

Gianni Ceresa · Answer

How do you imagine this to work?

OBIEE isn't a database or a data warehouse able to independently store data forever.

Kafka is all about streams: when a consumer read data, the data is read live and gone.

So what kind of behavior would you expect? What should OBIEE do exactly?

Keeping it simple: OBIEE has a long list of supported sources, and if Kafka isn't one of those, OBIEE also support ODBC and JDBC sources. If you have a standard ODBC/JDBC driver for Kafka, OBIEE can use it.

But Kafka isn't a database, it doesn't really understand queries, a consumer in Kafka receive the messages as they are. If you are thinking at KSQL that's a whole different things again.

Keeping it simple: you are skipping some steps and trying to connect 2 elements that aren't meant to be connected together. You maybe want to go back to your architecture and review the components and their role.