FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions
About Orienteer
Q: What is Orienteer? Is it just another data warehouse?
A: Orienteer is a framework for developing any kinds of applied data warehouses:
- a data warehouse
- a CRM/ERP/BPM solution
- a backend App Platform
- a framework for building web applications
- a business intelligence tool
- and many others.
Q: Will Orienteer be always free?
A: Yes, Orienteer platform will always be free. Our monetization is in:
- building specialized data marts
- customizing solutions
- support
Data model, configurations etc
Q: What do you call a document?
A: A document is an object/an instance of a class. Sometimes it might lead to misunderstanding.
Q: Сan I attach an arbitrary file to a document?
A: Yes. In the class of the document, you need to specify a parameter of type BINARY. You will then be able to attach a file as this parameter to a document. This file will be downloadable from the document.
If this file will be a picture, you can show its thumbnail in the document. For this, in the BINARY parameter's settings specify its visualization: Image.
Q: Can I implement actions that will work when a document fits to some criteria? For instance, when some property of a document takes a value within some range?
A: Yes. For this, you will use hooks (triggers), by deriving from the OTriggered class. They may trigger any automatic actions, from screen notifications or emails to making outomatic records to a log. For details, see OrientDB guide.
Q: Similarly, can Orienteer do specific actions on coincidences of data from many properties of many documents? For example, identifying statistical outlyers.
A: Yes. Similarly, this will require using hooks (triggers) by deriving from the OTriggered class. For details, see OrientDB guide.
Users and User Rights
Q: Can I make rights of users to read / write documents dependent on values of particular properties? E.g. I would like to make documents marked for audit visible for the Auditor role
A: Yes. There are two main ways for that:
- If a class extends the OTriggered class, you can set it to call the event onAfterRead that will check user rights. For details, see OrientDB guide.
- For providing higher performance, you can implement a java hook with the ORecordHook interface, which would check credentials of the user that works with data. For details, see OrientDB guide.
Q: How can I add company departments as groups of users to manage them in joint?
A: It's recommended to use Orienteer roles for modeling company departments. There are few reasons:
1) Person can be within multiple departments: roles do allow that. 2) According to department person is assigned to he can has different rights. Roles do allow to define that
Q: Сan we establish the common password workflow, when users can change their passwords themselves? Is there a way for a user for password recovery without involving the admin?
A: Users has write rights for their own passwords, so there is no problems with this.
Q: How can the administrator get user passwords?
A: Passwords are not stored in plain. So there is no way, even for administrator, get user's password.
Integrity and Data Control
Q: What happens if I change parameters of a property so that the existing property values are no more valid?
A: First of all, OrientDB will not allow that:)
Q: Can I change the type of a property? Are there any limitations?
A: You can select any property type during creation, but there are some limitations if you want to change a type of existing property. You can't change type to incompatible/nonconvertible type. For example, it's not possible to change type from STRING to INTEGER just because some values can't be converted.
Q: What happens to documents when I delete their class?
Unfortunately, you will lost your data.
Logging
Q: How can data changes be logged?
A: See http://orientdb.com/docs/last/Auditing.html
Q: How can I delete a class but leave its documents in the database for auditing and history logs? Can I hide it and prevent it from being used?
...
Performance
Q: What are performance limitations or Orienteer?
A: This depends on the hardware. [add testing]