Interactive Reporting enables you to retrieve data from relational databases and multidimensional database. Once you connect to a database, you can build a query to retrieve data to your desktop, and work with the data in report sections.
Relational databases store information in tables. A table is subdivided by column fields that group related information. The column fields are children of the parent table. For example, the Customer table may have columns including Name, Address, and ID number. Tables appears as topics, and columns appear as topic items. Each table contains row records that describe information about a singular entity, object, or event.
Database tables are linked by joins. Joins allows row records in different tables to linked based on shared information in a column field. For example, a row record in the Customer tables join to a related record in the Orders table when the Customer ID value for the record is the same in each table. This allows the order record to be linked with the record of the customer who placed the order.
A multidimensional database stores all dimensions together in a cube format instead of a tabular (relational) format and facilitates faster data retrieval. Dimensions define the multidimensional database with each indexing member corresponding directly to a dimension within the multidimensional cube. All points within the cube have a unique index key made up of member values from each dimension.