Kerberos authentication for OLE DB clients

If your environment uses Kerberos to authenticate user access to the databases, the OLE DB client application is responsible for obtaining the Kerberos authorization ticket.

The OLE DB client application must obtain the Kerberos authorization ticket from the Kerberos Authentication Server by using the kinit facility before connecting to the Netezza Performance Server databases. The Netezza Performance Server OLE DB provider detects that the Netezza Performance Server system uses Kerberos authentication and can transparently pass the authenticated user credentials to the database.

When establishing the OLE DB connection to the Netezza Performance Server data sources, you can specify a password in the UDL file or in the Vbscript, but the password is ignored. If you do not specify a password, the connections might return an error because of the null password. Specify a password as follows:

• For a UDL file, select the Blank Password check box on the Connection tab of the UDL file. If you do not select this option, the connection request fails with the error Test connection failed because of an error in initializing provider. Required properties not set (Server, user, password, ….etc.).
• For a Vbscript, set PASSWORD=NULL to avoid connection errors when the password in the connection string is null. If you do not specify this setting, the connection request fails with the error Required value is not set (Server, user, password, ...etc.)

For more information about configuring the Netezza Performance Server system to use Kerberos authentication, see the security section in the IBM® Netezza® System Administrator’s Guide.