An Alphablox application can drive analysis of data from multiple data sources, both relational and multidimensional. Through native access to the database (MDX for Microsoft® Analysis Services, Report Script for Essbase, and JDBC for relational databases), Alphablox exposes the analytic functionality in the database engine, such as ranking, derived calculations, ordering, filtering, percentiles, variances, standard deviations, correlations, trending, statistical functions, and other sophisticated calculations.
There are different ways live data can be presented to your users. If your users need data presented in grids and charts, first you add a DataBlox to your application and specify the data source to use for that instance of DataBlox. You immediately have access to all the analytic functionality inherent in the database engine. Then add a PresentBlox, which embeds a GridBlox and a ChartBlox, to use the data from that DataBlox. Now your users can interact with up-to-date data through the Blox user interface to meet their data analysis needs.
For example, for the CFO, the first screen she sees when she logs in may be an executive dashboard that contains a monthly income statement and a summary on market profit ranking. The data is live, and the CFO can choose to drill down on the data if she wants to find out which customer is buying which product.
For creating reports from a relational database, you can use Relational Reporting. At the core of Relational Reporting is the ReportBlox component, which renders a relational result set to a DHTML-based report. Other supporting Blox components provide data access, data transformation, calculation, and formatting functionality in Relational Reporting. Each of these Blox performs the specific task that its name suggests.
An relational report can be static or interactive. If you offer to render the report in interactive mode, your users can sort, filter, or reorder data on the fly using Relational Reporting’s Report Editor user interface to design their own relational reports.