Report is a collection of integrated institutional data that can be accessed by authorized managers, administrators, students, service providers, and institutional researchers for the purposes of monitoring application data, performing analyses, and producing predefined and ad hoc queries and reports. Data are extracted from the campus business transactional systems, placed into the warehouse, and retrieved and used for a variety of business activities.

In today’s database reporting market, most vendor applications use a proprietary format for representing the definition of a report. In addition, vendors that provide a report execution environment usually only support their own design tools. For customers, this means that reports cannot be easily moved between different reporting implementations and that there are few options for choosing new tools that work with their existing execution environments. A database report presents information retrieved from a table or query in a preformatted, attractive manner.