Why
do we need security in OBIEE?
OBIEE is a reporting tool wherein
multiple users belonging to multiple groups create multiple reports and
dashboards. Reports created by a particular group of users should be visible to
that particular group only or some specific data should be visible to only a
specific set of people. So, to achieve this we need to have some sort of
security thereby we can protect reports belonging to a group of users from the
users of other groups.
Users and Groups in OBIEE
End
users who make use of OBIEE for reporting need to be defined somewhere. These
users can be defined either in the OBIEE RPD, External database tables, LDAP
Servers or in Active directories with their respective passwords.
The
users belonging to same business unit can be clubbed and Groups can be created
for them. It’s not always necessary to create users in the RPD but its
necessary to create the groups in the RPD. Infact, creating several users in
the RPD can be a cumbersome job and it will also increase the size of the RPD,
so, according to the best practice create the users and groups on the DB(or add
in AD/LDAP) and associate them with the RPD groups by creating groups of the
same name on the RPD as in DB.
Authentication
& Authorization
Authentication means
validating the user while logging in the OBIEE application. When a user logs in
the OBIEE application a request is sent to the BI Server asking that whether
this user is a valid user or not. When BI Server validates the user,then only
the user is able to login in the application.
Authorization means
a user is authorized to view what all objects. Example, User A might be
authorized to view only particular set of reports and dashboards based on the
security applied.
Now we can understand these terms in
detail.
Types
of Security in OBIEE
Security
in Oracle BI can be classified broadly into the following three types.
1. Object Level security
(Authorization) Read More
2.
Data Level security (Authorization) Read More
3.
User Level Security (Authentication) Read More
