The Community Data Access (CDA) data source is an interesting type related to the so called Pentaho CDA. Pentaho CDA was designed to allow great flexibility for data sources. Most of the available tools can perform queries over a single data source and there's no easy way to combine data coming from different databases or in different languages (combining data from an SQL query with data from an MDX query). These tasks usually require an independent ETL job to synchronize different data sources and build a new database. Pentaho CDA was developed as an abstraction tool between database connections and Community Dashboard Framework (CDF), but in this context are used also in reporting.

Once this data source type is selected, a modal window is shown, as follows:

As you can see at the top of the window, a URL pointing to the Pentaho Business Analytics Platform is required (you will learnt more about it in Chapter 15, Using Reports in Pentaho Business...