Trail 3: Creating Business Cubes and Report Cubes

Report and business cubes provide a business intelligence OLAP style interface to data without requiring costly OLAP cubes. These cubes offer end users very powerful ad hoc capabilities, enabling them to slice and dice data at runtime using dimensions, measures and hierarchies (levels). For example, a simple date can be broken out into year, quarter, month, week and day dimensions that can be dragged onto the report. The end users that use business and report cubes to build ad hoc reports are referred to as business analysts, because, unlike a regular report end user, a business analyst will have to understand how to analyze the data and present it in an ad hoc report rather than just read or interact with the report.

Report cubes and business cubes are built in JReport Designer and are maintained within catalogs. At runtime, report and business cubes appear the same. However, report cubes work on pre-defined static queries while business cubes dynamically generate queries at run time as the user adds elements to the report.

A business or report cube is built from four kinds of elements: categories, dimensions, measures, and detail information.

Dimension objects are typical DBFields by which you want to group data. They present the availability and key performance of data, and characteristically return text data or dates, and answer the following question: who, when, what, where and which.
Measure objects are typically numeric DBFields to which an aggregate function, such as Sum, is applied or they can be an existing summary from the catalog.
Detail information objects are any DBField, typically they are values that you would want to display in the Detail section of a banded object. But they can be any type of DBField.
Categories are simply folders for organizing the other three elements, and can be used to present a hierarchy to the business analyst.

Meanwhile, to provide flexibility and convenience to business analyst playing with ad hoc reports, JReport provides two options to narrow down the records:

Built-in filter: It is defined in JReport Designer for business cubes only and transparent to the business analyst running the business cube reports.
Predefined filter: It is defined in the Designer side for both business and report cubes. Business analyst can apply the filters when designing/modifying reports based on the business/report cube.

The business cube and the report cube created in this trail are the basis for Trail 6: Creating and Analyzing Ad Hoc Reports. It may be helpful to view the types of ad hoc reports that the business and report cube support, before you begin this trail. You can read through Trail 6 and then return to this trail if desired.

Click the right arrow () below to begin reading the trail.