Patent ID: 7630956

Claim:
An extended online analytical server, comprising: one or more adaptors associated with one or more data sources, each adaptor converting one or more pieces of data from a particular data source having a particular data format into a common data format; an aggregator that aggregates the one or more pieces of data from the one or more data sources to generate aggregated pieces of data; a virtual schema generator that generates a virtual schema from the aggregated pieces of data without a data warehouse and without generating a snowflake data model, wherein the virtual schema is a multidimensional data model generated based on the data format of the one or more data sources; an indexing engine and a scheduler that update the virtual schema when new pieces of data are received by the aggregator; an analytical cube generator that generates a multidimensional analytical cube by executing commands from a declarative language against the virtual schema; and an application programming interface to an external tool wherein the application programming interface permits the external tool to access the piece of data in the analytical cube.