LDAP Authorization for OBIEE 10.1.3

Question

Hello,
We have setup LDAP authentication (ADSI LDAP) using OBIEE standalone.
I'm trying to figure out the best way to manage Authorization - user to group assignment in OBIEE.
Options:
1. Using external table
Challange: The client doesn't have other application that manages user to group assignment. If I am using external table authorization, how will they manage changes to user to group or add new user to group?? This will require IT admin to modify table directly in production. They would like to have business super user to handle new user to group assignment.
2. Import user to LDAP
This is unfortunately doesn't work with ADSI LDAP. I got error message: This function is not supported for all LDAP type..
3. I read something about using database DBMS_LDAP package. Basically: Define user to group assignment in LDAP. Define a db function to get db to group assignment. Call this db function in OBIEE.
I am not sure if this DBMS_LDAP package will work with DB2. Any comments will be helpful.
4. I thought about using Microsoft Excel to maintain user to group assignment and use the excel connection pool in Authorization init block. However, the OBIEE server is configured in AIX environment, and there is no excel driver for UNIX that's available...
Has anyone seen this scenario before? Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated..

Answer 1

When we were asked to combine OBIEE 10g with Active Directory, we chose external Table Authorization to get information on the groups, a user is part of.
In general, one could follow these articles to achieve AD Authentication:
[http://www.oraclebidwh.com/2008/10/obiee-ldap-authentication-using-microsoft-ad/|http://www.oraclebidwh.com/2008/10/obiee-ldap-authentication-using-microsoft-ad/]
[http://www.oraclebidwh.com/2008/11/obiee-ldap-authentication-using-microsoft-ad-2/|http://www.oraclebidwh.com/2008/11/obiee-ldap-authentication-using-microsoft-ad-2/]
To sum it up: Read User-information from AD. Knowing a user's login-name then, one could query an external table, which consists of user and group information. Everything is setup within initializationBlocks, which could be created in the administration tool.
Problem: As you already said, the problem is, that this external user--group table has to be filled and updated "manually". That is, someone has to input new users or at least assign them to the existing groups.
In our case, there's an admin who knows what sql is and how to work with it.
Another solution could be, to prepare a xml-file, containing user and group information and add it to your repository. The tables could then be queried, too. Although, xml files can become quite unhandy, if a lot of information is held within it, they can be edited via external tools or at least with a standard text editor.