Hello. This is the first Datamensional blog and personally the first blog I’ve ever wrote! Yes, I know I’m a little behind the times but our team aims to add useful and interesting knowledge for both Pentaho and the Business Intelligence communities.
What I have here is a YouTube Video that shows how to setup security roles for Mondrian on the Pentaho BI Server. The BI Server doesn’t come preconfigured to do Mondrian roles and there is actually quite a few ways to configure your Mondrian. I’ll show you the most common way in this video. (I think they should mention this in the next Pentaho Bootcamp. In fact, I’m teaching the next one in July ’11 in San Francisco and I’m going to bring that up)!
Now why on earth would you want to go through all this trouble? (Well, it’s really not too much trouble if you know exactly what to do, you could do it in about 10 minutes). What’s great about using role-based security in Mondrian is you can restrict data within the Mondrian Data Model also known as a cube based on the user who logs in. That user is then associated to a security role, such as California. The classic example is if a manager of sales who is responsible for the California sales territory logs into Pentaho and wants to view their sales cube, they will only see their California sales data. The advantage to the BI Developer is that they can centrally manage all access on the BI Server and only create one cube for the entire installation.
Without further ado, here is my YouTube video which shows you how to configure the BI Server for Role-based security.
I’ll be releasing another video in blog soon to show you how to implement this security in the cube itself. Stay tuned . . .
14 thoughts on “Pentaho Analysis Mondrian OLAP Security Setup – Part I”
Nice blog & video. Hopefully the first of many.
Thanks Rebecca! We plan to come out with more blog materials and videos at least once a week.
Thank you for sharing this so clearly. It is great to see a new source of Pentaho information. If you are taking requests, I would be interested in a video on how to upgrade a Pentaho installation.
You’re welcome, Nathan. The next time we do an Upgrade, we’ll document it. I think 2 hours is probably a little long for a YouTube video as that’s about how long an upgrade would take (typically)! I know for now if you’re an EE subscriber, there is decent documentation for an upgrade.
Indeed – great stuff!
Thanks Alex!
Great blog! These instructions are very useful for us!
Thanks so much Nicole. We hope it was useful. So far, our team didn’t see this documented anywhere this explicitly. We hope this helps the community.
Nice video Bejamin, just one BIG problem, in the video Part II at the 30 seconds of it there’s a problem with the audio that made your voice devilysh, after a minute or so it comes back but it is totally out of sync so if you please could check if your original video is ok and re-upload it, that would be awesome.
Rodrigo
Thanks Rodrigo. I’ll take a look at the error in the video. I wasn’t intending on releasing the second half yet on the blog itself, and was going to check it over before doing so. But I guess it’s out there on YouTube already and you were clever enough to find it. I’ll make sure that I don’t sound like I’m from The Shining.
Hi Benjamin
Thanks for sharing methodology to implement roles in mondrian.
I have done the same and it is working well for one role but not for multiple roles.
I defined two role in my mondrian schema as following:
And also I include these roles in connection string of datasource.xml (pentaho-solution/system/olap/datasources.xml) as following:
Provider=mondrian;DataSource=SampleData;Role=ceo;Role=cto;
solution:steel-wheels/analysis/SampleData.mondrian.xml
It is working well for one role but when I include second role nothing is appearing on jpivot view. I looked at MDX editor and remove the dimension with member null and run the query then desired data is appearing else it is not appearing.
Can you please suggest me if I am doing something wrong?
Please suggest me way to implement multiple roles.
Thanks,
Tushar
Hi Tushar,
Sorry for such a late response. We’re still trying to figure out how to control the spam and get the right messages to the others.
Did you define your roles in the Pentaho Enterprise/Administration Console? As you could see, there are three different ways to define your roles. Which way did you do it? Did you do it the default way in the video or different way?
I just found some internal documentation that I’ll try to release in a couple of days. Until then, you may even want to look at this link for additional help. I’m curious as to your results and I hope that you can succeed setting up your roles!
http://mondrian.pentaho.com/documentation/schema.php#Access_control
Thanks,
Ben
Hi,
Thanks for posting the video. When can we see the part 2 of this video?
Thanks,
M
Dear Mondrian/Pentaho BI server team
I am trying to implement this security options in Mondrian schema and currently am facing issues to get around with it. I am using pentaho biserver 5.0.1 Community edition.
1) Tried Listing 6.3. Lookup-map role mapper configuration by editing pentahoObjects.spring.xml as below (un-commented this portion) and restarted the biserver.`name=”Mondrian-SampleLookupMap-UserRoleMapper”class=”org.pentaho.platform.plugin.action.mondrian.mapper.MondrianLookupMapUserRoleListMapper” scope=”singleton”> <!– –>`
> 2) Created a user and role (both) named as suzy in Pentaho. Assigned the user suzy with the role suzy in Pentaho.
3) Designed the Mondrian schema which is working fine when tested through Saiku analytics without adding grants. However when added the following code in Mondrian schema xml file `
and while testing through the visualization tool (saiku). the schema doesn’t show. Knowing that i have added the following resctriction on my schema.
<!–
–>
> Please all i dearly seek your advise