Using OBIEE 11g Analytics with VPD database

Question

We are new to the OBIEE world. Our background has been in Discoverer for the past eight years. With Discoverer, the database handled all VPD issues. We simply had users create private database connections and Discoverer Plus would pass the user's credentials to the back end where a VPD policy would attach a predicate to a user's queries.
So I guess our question is, How do we accomplish the same thing in OBIEE 11g for Analytics? We don's see any way to get around the need for a shared connection pool, and we cannot see any way to add a database login screen, nor would we want to.
We are seeing things called initialization blocks and variables in the help files. We are assuming we will have to create some way of capturing the user's ID and passing it to the back end.
We can't be the first ones to face this challenge, so any help is appreciated.
Thanks in advance,
Ken

Answer 1

in the connection pool, you can use :USER and :PASSWORD and these will send the OBIEE login to the db, assuming each OBIEE user exists as a db user this should sort you out.
Alternatively, you implement a psuedo-VPD using OBIEE Security filters, assuming you have access to the tables that VPD is using, you can hold the predicates to be applied in variables via INIT blocks and have OBIEE apply them on an as-needed basis. Check security filters in the documentation.