The Single Interface - Normalization of Function

Historically, the general reporting and analysis needs of users within organizations has been serviced by multiple products where each product services a different informational need. Products are broken out into categories by the utility that they provide, each emphasizing functions that support a targeted need for information. Production reporting, query reporting, low-end OLAP, and high-end OLAP are functions offered by products in each of the categories.

Some products in different categories have some level integration usually when the products are from the same vendor. For the most part, however, these products provide low-levels of integration and facilities for sharing information. The main reason for this disparity is architecture. Most of these products are over five years old and were never designed to work together. True integration would require major architectural redesigns and user-interface modifications. Also, each must be separately maintained, many times with different administration utilities, installed, and licensed.

Truly providing a single interface to enterprise reporting and analysis needs means that each function must be normalized. Here, features specific to a function offer a separate utility for using the function; features that are necessary for more that one function are designed generically providing and single utility for multiple functions. Most important, both use the same physical user-interface. For example, the facilities available to query a relational database are usually different from those available to query a multidimensional database. Most multidimensional servers offer advanced functions that are not available in a relational database server. As a result, the query features that are made available in an application will most likely be dependant on the data source. On the other hand, there are many features that are common across data sources. In these cases, once the desired data has been retrieved from the data source, common functions can be supported by the same features. For example, a report that is a result of a relational query has the same presentation needs as one created from a multidimensional source. Here, a user should be able to use the same formatting utilities within either report.

System Services

In addition, when these functions are used within a portal platform, they can leverage the system services available in the environment. For example, if new data is available for a report, the notification system within the portal can notify users of the event independent of whether that report was created against a relational or multidimensional data source.