Patent ID: 7945597

Claim:
A computer readable storage medium comprising executable instructions to: create a report specification comprising reporting objects, wherein the report specification characterizes report layout and structure; process the reporting objects to form a deduced set of data; generate queries based on the deduced set of data, wherein the queries include a data source query structure with a hierarchical tree of block structures, wherein each data source query structure of the hierarchical tree of block structures comprises at least one of an axes field and a data space expression field; create a data retrieval cube structure based on the data source query structure, wherein the executable instructions to create the data retrieval cube structure further comprise executable instructions to generate a plurality of data source expressions, wherein the executable instructions to generate queries are further based on the data source expressions and transform each data source expression into a corresponding query expression to retrieve the data for the reporting objects from the data sources, wherein the data sources comprise at least one of a relational database management system (RDBMS) and an On-line Analytical Processing (OLAP) database; execute the queries to retrieve data from one or more data sources for the reporting objects; and present a report based upon the data.