• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.154-166
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• 2009

Database query and reporting tools, OLAP tools and data mining tools are typical front-end tools in Business Intelligence environment which is able to support gathering, consolidating and analyzing data produced from business operation activities and provide access to the result to enterprise's users. Traditional reporting tools have an advantage of creating sophisticated dynamic reports including SQL query result sets, which look like documents produced by word processors, and publishing the reports to the Web environment, but data source for the tools is limited to RDBMS. On the other hand, OLAP tools and data mining tools have an advantage of providing powerful information analysis functions on each own way, but built-in visualization components for analysis results are limited to tables or some charts. Thus, this paper presents a system that integrates three typical front-end tools to complement one another for BI environment. Traditional reporting tools only have a query editor for generating SQL statements to bring data from RDBMS. However, the reporting tool presented by this paper can extract data also from OLAP and data mining servers, because editors for OLAP and data mining query requests are added into this tool. Traditional systems produce all documents in the server side. This structure enables reporting tools to avoid repetitive process to generate documents, when many clients intend to access the same dynamic document. But, because this system targets that a few users generate documents for data analysis, this tool generates documents at the client side. Therefore, the tool has a processing mechanism to deal with a number of data despite the limited memory capacity of the report viewer in the client side. Also, this reporting tool has data structure for integrating data from three kinds of data sources into one document. Finally, most of traditional front-end tools for BI are dependent on data source architecture from specific vendor. To overcome the problem, this system uses XMLA that is a protocol based on web service to access to data sources for OLAP and data mining services from various vendors.