Patent ID: 7756822

Claim:
A system for operational reporting of multidimensional analysis of business data sources, the system comprising: a plurality of computing systems each including at least one programmable processor, each of the programmable processors systems executing one or more computer programs, the programmable processors being coupled to receive data and instructions from, and to transmit data and instructions to, at least one storage system, at least one input device, and at least one output device, the computing systems providing: one or more data sources providing OLTP data; one or more data acquisition modules to access, in a data access layer, the OLTP data from the one or more data sources; a business intelligence (BI) platform having a multidimensional database providing OLAP data, the BI platform being in a service layer; a resource adapter direct mapping tool to transform the OLTP data of the data sources not being processed by an OLAP engine or the BI platform to a first data set in accordance with a common meta model of a unified view module, the BI platform being in the service layer; the unified view module being part of a data abstraction layer, the unified view module integrating the first data set of the OLTP data with the multidimensional data of the multidimensional database to produce a common meta model data set; and a user interface (UI) tool set for creating a unified UI for displaying reports that are run on the multidimensional database and common meta model data set, the unified UI to build reports from the common meta model data set; the system including at least first and second data flow integration paths originating at the data sources and passing through the data access layer, the service layer, and the data abstraction layer, the first integration path comprising the OLTP data and the resource adapter direct mapping tool and having a first service quality, and the second integration path comprising the BI platform and having a second service quality being different from the first service quality, the first service qualities being dependent on the services used by the first integration path, the second service qualities being dependent on the services used by the second integration path, and wherein the first and second service qualities are at least different in that the second service quality comprises at least some overhead of the BI platform that is not included in the first service quality, the system further comprising a resource adapter integration path allowing integration of OLTP data and external OLAP data without using the OLAP engine or other services of the BI platform.