Configuring Pentaho CE 5.2 to work with Oracle 12c

Pentaho is just awesome. The fact that it is open source make it really useful for SME that do not have a massive budget. Although its UI may not be flashy and polished, it comes with a suite of powerful tools that can get the job done really well. During recent work on mining data from various database, Oracle 12c seems to be the most problematic to get it working. After experimenting with various configuration, finally got them to talk using JNDI setup.

1. Oracle 12c Configuration
On the Oracle 12c server, the tnsname is configured as follows:

tnsnames.ora

# tnsnames.ora Network Configuration File: /home/oracle/app/oracle/product/12.1.0/dbhome_1/network/admin/tnsnames.ora
# Generated by Oracle configuration tools.

JUPITER =
  (DESCRIPTION =
    (ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = TCP)(HOST = 192.168.56.11)(PORT = 1521))
    (CONNECT_DATA =
      (SERVER = DEDICATED)
      (SERVICE_NAME = jupiter)
    )
  )

PDBJUPITER =
  (DESCRIPTION =
    (ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = TCP)(HOST = 192.168.56.11)(PORT = 1521))
    (CONNECT_DATA =
      (SERVER = DEDICATED)
      (SERVICE_NAME = pdbjupiter)
    )
  )

* JUPITER         - CDB database
* PDBJUPITER   - PDB database

2. Installing Oracle JDBC Driver in Pentaho
Copy the Oracle JDBC driver, ojdbc7.jar from
       <ORACLE_INSTALLATION_PATH>/product/12.1.0/dbhome_1/jdbc/lib/
to
       <PENTAHO_INSTALLATION_PATH>/lib/

Note: Copy the ojdbc6.jar instead if using JDK 1.6

3. Pentaho DI 5.2 - Spoon Configuration
Locate jdbc.properties file at data_integration/simple_jndi folder. After adding the configuration for Oracle 12c, it becomes as follows:

jdbc.properties

SampleData/type=javax.sql.DataSource
SampleData/driver=org.h2.Driver
SampleData/url=jdbc:h2:file:samples/db/sampledb;IFEXISTS=TRUE
SampleData/user=PENTAHO_USER
SampleData/password=PASSWORD
Quartz/type=javax.sql.DataSource
Quartz/driver=org.hsqldb.jdbcDriver
Quartz/url=jdbc:hsqldb:hsql://localhost/quartz
Quartz/user=pentaho_user
Quartz/password=password
Hibernate/type=javax.sql.DataSource
Hibernate/driver=org.hsqldb.jdbcDriver
Hibernate/url=jdbc:hsqldb:hsql://localhost/hibernate
Hibernate/user=hibuser
Hibernate/password=password
Shark/type=javax.sql.DataSource
Shark/driver=org.hsqldb.jdbcDriver
Shark/url=jdbc:hsqldb:hsql://localhost/shark
Shark/user=sa
Shark/password=

PdbJupiter/type=javax.sql.DataSource
PdbJupiter/driver=oracle.jdbc.pool.OracleDataSource
PdbJupiter/url=jdbc:oracle:thin:@192.168.56.11:1521/pdbjupiter
PdbJupiter/user=biadm
PdbJupiter/password=password

* PdbJupiter    - JNDI name
* pdbjupiter    -  PDB database 
* biadm           - A normal user created for PDB

Launch Spoon, go to Tools -> Repository -> Explore -> Connections and add the connection to Oracle 12c as shown in the screen below.

Spoon should now be able to extract and load data from Oracle 12c.

Note: For Oracle 12c, the database url connection has been changed from
            jdbc:oracle:thin:@192.168.56.11:1521:<SID>
to
            jdbc:oracle:thin:@192.168.56.11:1521/<SERVICE NAME>
Hence, using Native(JDBC) method to connect to Oracle 12c database is not working as it only regconise the first format.