The Basics of Report Execution

Now that you have designed reports containing filters and limits, you can better understand how a report is generated. The following table describes the steps to execute a report.

Step	Description
1	The objects in Report Objects and the report filter are used to calculate all the metrics, based on the data in the data warehouse.
2	A logical result set is generated in the database or brought back to the Intelligence Server. Optimally, the result set remains in the database to increase performance.
3	If there is a report limit, it is applied at the level of the Report Objects to further restrict the result set. The report limit is based on the result of the metric calculations from step 1.
4	If there are no other functions, the report is returned to the user and displayed in the selected format.

These four steps are the data definition section of the report execution. The data definition establishes how the data is accessed and manipulated in the data warehouse.

The other functions noted in step 4 comprise the view definition, which represents how the data is viewed and manipulated in Intelligence Server. The remainder of this section covers manipulating the final report result set generated in step 3.