List reports are a simple type of report that presents data in a plain tabular way and are very similar to regular spreadsheets. As such, they offer some analytical functionality through filtering, sorting and formulas and are well suited for the delivery of information aimed at answering single and well-defined business questions requiring little additional processing. Knowing which customers or products are the most profitable, which products account for the 80% of the sales or which salesmen are selling best in the current period are some typical questions a List Report can easily answer.

List reports are easily created by directly selecting fields from the table the report is based on.

List report options define how a list report is treated as part of an ETL-job. However, as reports are the final output of the process, the available parameters focus on report functionality rather than on data processing.

There are two important parameters to note. The first is the path or location for the report file to be created. The second is the possibility to define a password in order to restrict the access to the given report.

A cube or OLAP-report can be defined as a set of data organised and summarised into a multi-dimensional structure composed by Dimensions and Measures. The main aim of this type of report is to quickly provide answers to analytical queries that are multi-dimensional in nature and that cannot be efficiently answered by regular database queries.

OLAP-reports are easily created by directly selecting fields from the table the report is based on. Each selected field must also be defined as either a dimension or a measure.

A dimension represents the categories describing similar sets of items upon which a decision maker is interested in carrying out an analysis. For instance, a Country Dimension may include elements such as Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany and France. Dimensions can also be arranged in three different ways, namely Pages, Columns and Rows.

Measures are a set of numeric values which are aggregated and analysed. These values are central to the report and are organised according to the defined dimensions. Measures are by definition metric variables and as such their main purpose is to describe each member of a dimension included in an OLAP-report. Some common examples of measures are sales, costs, profits and expenditures.

OLAP-report options define how an OLAP-report is treated as part of an ETL-job. However, as reports are the final output of the process, the available parameters focus on report functionality rather than on data processing.

There are two important parameters to note. The first is the path or location for the report file to be created. The second is the possibility to define a password in order to restrict the access to the given report.