After we spent quite a bit of time becoming familiar with the metadata editor, it is time to use the metadata domain model that we defined earlier and build a very simple tabular report. As we will see in this chapter's recipes, the very first and immediate advantage of using a metadata domain model to build a report is the more business-user-oriented approach because no SQL knowledge is needed to build the query and all of the formatting aspects are already covered in the definition of the metadata domain model. Therefore, everything is easier, especially for the average business user who does not have any particular technical background.
Pentaho interactive reporting is a web tool, available only in Pentaho Enterprise Edition (EE), which lets the user build a very simple but effective tabular report directly from inside Pentaho User Console. For anyone using Pentaho BA Server CE, it is possible to design a tabular report interactively directly from the web interface by using...