Does Open Web Analytics allow me to create reports from the data stored in our database for our web application?

Question

I am looking for a tool that allows us to create reports from the data in our database, like Crystal Reports, and the many other Database Reporting tools out there. I came across Open Web Analytics which says it uses SQL and has a database access layer. Does this mean I can have a single tool for web analytics and for database reporting?

So can I set up Open Web Analytics with access to my database and create SQL queries that will produce reports that can be viewed on the dashboard, and can these be combined with web analytics data for even better reports?

are there any other tools I should look at that can do similar. What do other companies (small companies) do to monitor this type of information?

any advice / pointers welcome. regards

Answer 1

OWA is not a generic reporting tool.

OWA has a defined database schema that it uses. If the data that you want to integrate fits into that schema then you can use the API to export all sort of combinations and create custom reports.

If the data does not fit into the schema then you need to add new tables to house the data and build new entity, metric, dimension classes - which is a good deal of coding.

OWA reporting/ORM layer is a bit particular about representing data as facts and dimensions. So much that it currently doesn't allow you to join two fact tables together (for performance reasons) - forcing you to de-normalize all metric combinations into a single fact table.