Interactive Reporting makes the database accessible by presenting its contents through custom views called Data Models. Data Models are focused, visual representations of actual database tables. Through the Data Model, users interact with the database, browsing and specifying what data to retrieve for analysis.
Data Models can make the database more accessible by:
A Data Model displays database tables as topics in the Contents pane. Topics are visually joined together like database tables and contain related items used to build a query.
Multiple queries can be constructed against a single Data Model in the same document file. If you modify the Data Model, any changes are automatically propagated to the corresponding queries.
In addition to standard Data Models derived from database tables, you can create meta topics - virtual views independent of the actual database. You use meta topics to standardize complex calculations and simplify views of the underlying data with intuitive topics customized for business needs.
To preserve a Data Model for future queries, promote it to a master Data Model and lock its basic property design. This allows you to generate future queries without having to recreate the Data Model. A Interactive Reporting document file can contain any number of master data models from which any numbers of queries can be generated.