Understanding the data components of BIRT

BIRT's data connection capabilities can be broken into two main logical constructs. Well, actually there would be three, but for the purposes of our discussion, we need to think only about two. The first is the Data Source. A Data Source is information about physical connections to databases, text files, or some other data source. In the Classic Cars example, the Data Source is the ODA connection information. If we were connecting to a MySQL database, the Data Source would contain information such as the IP address or DNS name of the database server, the database name, and the user name and password we are using to connect to the database. The Data Sources themselves do not usually contain any data that we will display in our report. There are exceptions, but they are few.

The second is the dataset. For our purposes, the dataset will contain a description of the data we want to retrieve such as SQL queries or custom code that will populate the data...