Dynamics 365 Business Central Reporting and Star Schemas in OBIEE

The CData ODBC Driver for Dynamics 365 Business Central is a standard database driver that can integrate real-time access to Dynamics 365 Business Central data into your data warehouse or directly into your reporting tool. This article shows how to bypass the data warehouse and import operational Dynamics 365 Business Central data into Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE).

See the knowledge base for ODBC integrations with ETL tools like Informatica PowerCenter. For an ETL solution into Oracle Warehouse Builder, use the driver with the Oracle ODBC Gateway to Access Dynamics 365 Business Central Data as a Remote Oracle Database.

Connect to Dynamics 365 Business Central as an ODBC Data Source

If you have not already, first specify connection properties in an ODBC DSN (data source name). This is the last step of the driver installation. You can use the Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator to create and configure ODBC DSNs.

To authenticate to Dynamics 365 Business Central, you must provide the User and AccessKey properties.

To obtain the User and AccessKey values, navigate to the Users page in Dynamics 365 Business Central and then click on Edit. The User Name and Web Service Access Key values are what you will enter as the User and AccessKey connection string properties. Note that the User Name is not your email address. It is a shortened user name.

To connect to data, specify OrganizationUrl. If you have multiple companies in your organization, you must also specify the Company to indicate which company you would like to connect to. Company does not need to be specified if you have only one company.

When you configure the DSN, you may also want to set the Max Rows connection property. This will limit the number of rows returned, which is especially helpful for improving performance when designing reports and visualizations.

Import Dynamics 365 Business Central Metadata

Follow the steps below to use the OBIEE Client Tools to import Dynamics 365 Business Central metadata into an OBIEE repository. You can then integrate Dynamics 365 Business Central data into your business models.

1. Open the Administration Tool and click File -> New Repository.

2. In the Connection Type menu, select ODBC 3.5 and select the CData DSN.
3. Select the metadata types you want to import under the Relational Sources option and then select Dynamics 365 Business Central tables.