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AngelaHarvey
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert

Big Data brings big opportunities, but as with all new opportunities, there are also new challenges.

To adjust to the challenges Big Data brings (like variety, and structure of data types) there is an emergence of new Big Data datasources.

Lumira is optimized for many Hadoop technologies, like Hive, Impala, EMR and Spark. And we also support other Big Data sources, such as MongoDB and Amazon Redshift.

But keeping pace with the emergence of Big Data sources is nearly impossible. Which is why we offer generic JDBC connectivity (which works for both Big Data and non-big data sources). Don’t be scared by the “techy” sounding name. All that means is we can connect to any data source that has a JDBC driver.

From Wikipedia:

Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) is an application programming interface (API) for the programming language Java, that defines how a client may access a database. It is part of the Java Standard Edition platform, from Oracle Corporation.



Simply put, JDBC ensures that the information (or data) inside a database can be accessed by clients (or software programs), without the database and program having any formal integration.

Let’s jump over to Lumira and see that is really is pretty easy…


Connect by selecting the Query with SQL option

Then select the generic JDBC driver


You’ll need to have the JDBC drivers for your datasource installed before the next step. Most databases on the market provide JDBC drivers, or you can easily get them from a third party like Simba Technologies.

Then enter the credentials of the data source you’d like to connect to.


You can connect to more than one data source using the same generic driver in Lumira because it can contain multiple connection files for different data sources.

While this blog focuses on Lumira, the Business Objects suite supports generic JDBC and ODBC as well.

We’re adding new data sources with most releases, so watch this page, but in the meantime if you would like to connect to data that isn’t supported out of the box, you can leverage generic JDBC.