ODA and ODBC access from thin clients

mpatel

Active Member
I need to find a way to allow users using ow via citrix thin client the means to access the data base for reporting purposes. I looked at ODBC but that gives unristricted access to all data and requires oracle passwords etc.. to be set on the users pc, Ideally I'm looking at the ODA driver, but that will not work in a standalone mode on a pc without the rest of the fat client.
Has anyone managed to create thier own ODA/ODBC access method to the data base for pc's running ow over citrix ??
 
Hi,

If what you want is a local client application such as Excel or Access to use the Citrix data channel to access the ODA driver on the Citrix server I think you are out of luck unless you want to write your own virtual data channel using the Citrix SDK. (See cdn.citrix.com)

If you are willing to publish the app used for data manipulation then you can use ODA on the Citrix server to provide data for published apps such as Access and Excel. ODA is installed automatically by the client install program.

ODA is a great concept in that is supports OW authentication, row security, data dictionary descriptions, etc. It has unfortunately been pretty hard to use. From release to release and service pack to service pack things break are fixed and break again. There a number of mainstream ODBC compliant applications, such as Crystal Reports, that do not work reliably with the ODA driver. There are also a series of limitations around what kind of joins you can do and how many tables can participate in a join.

The following KG documents discuss ODA's limitations:

Oti-00-0087
oti-01-0137
ott-01-0016
Oti-00-0088


What my clients usually end up doing is to configure special read-only database user id's and use those to configure direct ODBC connections for their particular database platform. You can provide row level security by using database views over the tables you want to protect and then granting SELECT access to the views.

You can preload the user id in the ODBC connection setup. This solution still requires that they enter password when accessing it.

Regards,

Justin Miller
[email protected]

working with B7332 and XE on AS/400, NT, Solaris and AIX
 
I have the same need. Did you ever find anything that worked for you?

I would like to find a way to use the ODA functionality on a thin client
that uses Remote Desktop (like Windows Terminal Server). Our enterprise
server is in the U.K. and we all just have Terminal Server over here. We do
have access to a thick client via pcAnywhere, but it is slow, and there
aren't many connections (just one, actually right now).

Thanks,

Ian

Ian Smith
Senior Business Consultant
Capita Technologies, Inc.

Current Client Config:
OneWorld B73.3.1, SP 15.1
Remote Desktop access (similar to Terminal Server)
Windows 2000
SQL 7



Current Client Configuration:
OneWorld B73.3.1
Windows 2000, SQL 7
accessed via Remote Desktop (Terminal Server)
 
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