Many organisational DSpace users run reports on DSpace not from within DSpace itself, but from within an external reporting system (Business Intelligence, JasperReports, etc) which connect to DSpace via ODBC. Reports may be run on an external reporting system rather than DSpace to allow integrated reporting across a number of systems, to allow integration with other organisational systems, to exploit existing reporting skills, or for other reasons. Typically the connection is read-only, this allows both better security (since it limits the damage that an incompetent or malicious user can do) and better performance (since read-only accesses to tables typically require less locking or resource-use in most databases).
Setting up External Reporting
There are typically four steps to connecting DSpace to an external reporting system. Creating a database user with appropriate rights, allowing database connections from the remote system, opening firewall ports and creating the connection string.
Creating the user
Postgres
CREATE ROLE reporting LOGIN PASSWORD 'SECRET'; GRANT CONNECT ON DATABASE dspace to reporting; GRANT USAGE ON SCHEMA public TO reporting; GRANT SELECT ON ALL TABLES IN SCHEMA public TO reporting
Oracle
TODO
Enabling remote database connections
Postgres
host dspace reporting 10.123.0.0/64 md5
Oracle
TODO
Opening firewall ports
In a complex environment, there are likely to be firewalls between the machine hosting the database for DSpace and the machine(s) hosting the reporting software. These firewalls need to be opened on port 5432 (assuming the default postgres port).
Creating the connection string
TODO
Creating reports
ODBC-based reporting tools work by running one or more SQL query against the underlying DSpace database. You can find some examples in
Reusing reports
TODO
This is based on on
"support for connecting to institutional reporting tools"