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Issues that we find with gaian itself are recorded via the GaianDB GitHub Issue Tracker

Supported data sources with Gaian

The gaiandb readme lists the supported data stores as:

• DB2
• SQL Server
• MySQL
• Oracle
• CSV Files
• Excel spreadsheets (requires Apache POI)

The gaiandb prereq document additionally documents these 

• Hive
• Lucene
• BigSQL

I (Nigel) have personally had success in additionally using

• Postgres (though use of TEXT rather than VARCHAR resulted in this performance issue
• MariaDB (which is a fork of mysql)

See specific links on versions (my tests were current as of Nov 2017)

The gaian team have also successully used Hive (requiring hive-jdbc and hadoop-commons)

Changing your application to make use of GaianDB

Any applications which previously might have gone directly to the underlaying data source should now connect to the GaianDB database via JDBC.

The current Apache Derby driver is the preferred client driver to use, following the derby url prefix of jdbc:derby:net

In the event of any application not permitting additional JDBC drivers to use it may be possible to use the DB2 unified driver, either with the prefix of jdbc:derby:net or jdbc:db2, but this is not supported by gaiandb/derby/db2 at this point

An issue has been raised for further clarification on exact levels supported

A note on User Impersonation

Many existing databases allow user impersonation - ie the JDBC connection to the database will be made using an NPA (non personal account) such as admin/admin (not really!), but then additional properties will be passed on the connection to specify the effective user id (so that policies/security can be applied). 

Additionally applications such as UIs may have a web application behind them that acts on behalf of many users - it effectively uses a pooled connection to execute queries on their behalf. Here the effective user may change even during the connection using additional API calls.

Work to add this capability to gaiandb is currently underway in RANGER-1850

NOTE: At a future point it is expected an OCF-compliant connector will be available.

Enforcing data access through gaian

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