Creating DSNs for OEM Environments

Establishing communication between MicroStrategy and your databases or other data sources is an essential first step in configuring MicroStrategy products for reporting and analysis of your data. These data sources are used to store the data warehouse and the MicroStrategy metadata, which are both required to support a MicroStrategy reporting environment.

To create a connection to these data sources you need an ODBC driver as well as a data source name (DSN). MicroStrategy comes packaged with ODBC drivers to support connecting to various data sources. For more information on ODBC drivers, see Communicating with Databases.

When setting up your OEM environment, you must create a separate DSN to connect to the main data source and the metadata repository. This requirement is true even if the data source and metadata repository are stored in the same database or other data source. The main data source and the metadata are described below:

• A data source stores the data that users of the system can analyze through BI capabilities offered by MicroStrategy products.
• Metadata is a repository whose data associates the tables and columns of a data warehouse with user-defined attributes and facts to enable the mapping of business views, terms, and needs to the underlying database structure. Metadata can reside on the same server as the data warehouse or on a different server. It can be also be stored in a different relational database than your data warehouse. A metadata can be created using the Configuration Wizard, as described in Configuring a MicroStrategy Installation.

A DSN can be created using the MicroStrategy Connectivity Wizard, as described in Defining DSNs.