A cross tabulation (or cross tab) allows you to view dimensional data in a report. Using cross tabs, you can easily view two or more fields and how they relate based on a measure. Cross tabs summarize the information in your database and they lay out in a grid, with rows representing dimensions (for example, country, date, or salesperson), columns representing another dimensions, and the intersection containing the aggregations (usually sums). Cross tabs are similar to pivot tables in Microsoft Excel.

Pentaho Reporting offers the ability to create cross tab based reports. These are special type of reports that render differently than most standard reports. These reports also expect the data to be in a particular format. Cross tab reports can be driven by multidimensional queries (as highlighted in Chapter 6, Configuring JDBC and Other Data Sources, Pentaho Reporting offers a Mondrian and OLAP4j data source for providing multidimensional data to a report...