Chapter 2. The Query

The Query section is a gateway to Interactive Reporting for building a query and retrieving data from a database. The Query provides the business analyst with an ad-hoc interface to model and analyze data, allowing the analyst to create, modify, and run scenarios on key business metrics. The Query section supplies the data for all of the other presentation sections of the document, and the Query section can easily be modified and reprocessed as desired. The goal of this chapter is to provide the business analyst with the tools necessary to effectively build and manage queries from a data model.

This chapter covers:

• An overview of the Query section layout

• Building a query

• Creating request items

• Creating filters

• Sorting

• Query processing

• Query options

• Identifying metadata (table and column remarks)

The following two chapters address features of the query including building data models and advanced querying and filtering techniques.

Note

The examples in this section are based on the...