Introduction

In an enterprise application, data analysis is an important aspect, which provides crucial insight into the data the enterprise has. This insight into the existing data can provide invaluable information about the overall business health and the areas where further improvement is needed or possible—leading to effective decision-making. Reports are a static way of analyzing the data and getting the information out of it. However, reports require a pre-defined data analysis pattern—for example, a sales person will only look at the past year product-wise sale performance to come up with the forecast for this year. In today's dynamic world, it may not always be possible to come up with all the possible analysis patterns and provide reports based on that to the users. Hence the need of a good analytic framework becomes the need of the hour for an enterprise.

Traditionally, it is advisable not to load the transaction database with the analysis. Rather, create a data warehouse with...