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Quick Start Guide for Windows

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  • Prerequisites
  • Getting Started

Estimated Time to Complete: ~15 minutes

This guide provides step-by-step instructions to quickly set up the required components for the BI Connector on your local system using a ODBC driver.

This guide is recommended for users who would like to experiment with the BI Connector or create a local environment for development or testing on Microsoft Windows.

In this tutorial you will:

  • Start a local MongoDB mongod process

  • Start a local BI Connector mongosqld process

  • Install the ODBC driver and create a data source name (DSN)

  • Connect with a BI tool of your choice

1

If mongod is not already running on your local system, start it from the command line in the MongoDB program directory. You can create the default data directory at C:\data\db or specify a different directory with the --dbpath option.

mkdir C:\data\db
"C:\Program Files\MongoDB\Server\3.6\bin\mongod.exe"
2

Make sure your MongoDB instance has at least one collection with some data for testing purposes. A sample dataset with United States ZIP code information (3.2 MB) is available at media.mongodb.org/zips.json.

Note

To save the ZIP code dataset directly to disk, right click on the link and select "Save Link As..." This tutorial assumes that the saved file is in the directory C:\data.

Import the dataset into MongoDB. The following command imports the zips.json file into a collection named zips in a database named test:

"C:\Program Files\MongoDB\Server\3.6\bin\mongoimport.exe" --db test --collection zips --file "C:\data\zips.json"

See the MongoDB manual for help with mongoimport, the mongo shell program, and CRUD operations.

3

Start a mongosqld process from the command line in the BI Connector program directory.

"C:\Program Files\MongoDB\Connector for BI\2.3\bin\mongosqld.exe"

With no command line options, mongosqld generates a schema from all the user-accessible collections in your MongoDB instance. For more information about specifying database namespaces for BI Connector to work with, see the mongosqld reference page.

If mongosqld starts correctly, the last line of on-screen output declares the namespaces it has found for its schema. For example, the following output indicates that mongosqld started correctly and sampled the zips namespace.

[schemaDiscovery] mapped schema for 1 namespaces: "test" (1): ["zips"]
4

Create a System DSN by following instructions in the tutorial. For the purposes of this local test installation you can leave the User, Password and Authentication fields blank, because mongosqld is running without the --auth option.

Windows ODBC DSN
click to enlarge

When you press the Test button you should see the Connection Successful result.

5

To learn how to connect from your BI Tool, see several applications.

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