Business Intelligence Document

• US 20150331918A1
• Filed: 05/26/2015
• Published: 11/19/2015
• Est. Priority Date: 12/17/2010
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Microsoft Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Microsoft Corporation)
• Inventors: Mital, Vijay, Rubin, Darryl, Green, David George, Katzenberger, Gary Shon, Colle, Olivier, Poozhiyil, Suraj
• Granted Patent: US 9,953,069 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 1/1
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/254 Extract, transform and load [ETL] procedures, e.g. ETL data flows in data warehouses
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/93 Document management systems
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 8/34 Graphical or visual programming
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 9/4494 data driven

Abstract

A business intelligence (BI) document preserves references to identities and formats of remote data sources and allows a local computing device to offload analytical operations to remote data sources. The BI document specifies a graph of entities connected by directed edges from the output of one entity to an input of another entity. An entity, for example, can represent without limitation a data structure, an external data source, a control element, an external event source, a visualization, or an update service. The entities of a BI document at a local computing device can reference data at an original data source—rather than extracting data from the original data source to a preferred local datastore. An entity of the BI document can direct a remote data source to execute transformations on the remote data before returning a solution to the local computing device.

Claims

1. A method comprising:

receiving into memory of a local computing system a description of one or more pipeline-connected entities defining an application, wherein the one or more pipeline-connected entities include a first entity including one or more expressions and designating a remote data source for evaluation of the one or more expressions of the first entity by the remote data source, a second entity including one or more expressions and designating data of the local computing device against which the one or more expressions of the second entity are to be locally evaluated, and a visualization entity including one or more expressions defining a user interface;

updating the one or more connected entities in memory based on a remotely computed result of the first entity and a locally computed result of the second entity; and

presenting at least one of the remotely computed result of the first entity and the locally computed result of the second entity via the user interface defined by the visualization entity.

2. The method of claim 1 wherein the description of the one or more connected entities forms a directed acyclic graph.

3. The method of claim 1 further comprising:

communicating the one or more expressions of the first entity to the remote data source; and

receiving the remotely computed result of the first entity from the remote data source.

4. The method of claim 1 further comprising evaluating the one or more expressions of the second entity against the designated local data to yield the locally computed result.

5. The method of claim 1 wherein the one or more expressions of the first entity specify a symbolic representation of a computation to be performed on the designated data of the remote data source, wherein each expression are solvable by an expression engine of the remote data source.

6. The method of claim 1 wherein the first entity defines an output communicating to an input of another entity of the description, wherein the data value at the output is the remotely computed result.

7. The method of claim 1 wherein an input of an entity is formatted to accept an output of another entity.

8. One or more computer-readable storage media storing a data structure, the data structure comprising:

a set of pipeline-connected entities defining an application, the set including;

a first entity including one or more expressions and designating data of a remote data source for evaluation of the one or more expressions of the first entity by the remote data source to yield a remotely computed result,

a second entity including one or more expressions and designating data of a local computing device against which the one or more expressions of the second entity are to be locally evaluated to yield a locally computed result, and

a visualization entity including one or more expressions defining a user interface, wherein at least one of the remotely computed result of the first entity and the locally computed result are presentable via the user interface defined by the visualization entity.

9. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 8, wherein the set of connected entities are updateable based on the remotely computed result of the first entity and the locally computed result of the second entity.

10. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 8 wherein the set of connected entities forms a directed acyclic graph.

11. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 8 wherein the one or more expressions of the first entity are capable of communication to the remote data source.

12. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 8 wherein the one or more expressions of the first entity specify a symbolic representation of a computation to be performed on the designated data of the remote data source, wherein each expression is solvable by an expression engine of the remote data source.

13. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 8 wherein the first entity defines an output communicating to an input of another entity of the description, wherein the data value at the output is the remotely computed result.

14. One or more computer-readable storage media encoding computer-executable instructions for executing on a computer system a computer process, the computer process comprising:

receiving into memory of a local computing system a description of one or more pipeline-connected entities defining an application, wherein the one or more pipeline-connected entities include;

a first entity including one or more expressions and designating data of a remote data source against which the one or more expressions of the first entity are to be evaluated by the remote data source,

a second entity including one or more expressions and designating data of the local computing device against which the one or more expressions of the second entity are to be locally evaluated, and

a visualization entity including one or more expressions defining a user interface;

updating the one or more connected entities in memory based on a remotely computed result of the first entity and a locally computed result of the second entity; and

presenting at least one of the remotely computed result of the first entity and the locally computed result of the second entity via the user interface defined by the visualization entity.

15. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 14 wherein the description of the one or more connected entities forms a directed acyclic graph.

16. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 14 wherein the computer process further comprises:

communicating the one or more expressions of the first entity to the remote data source; and

receiving the remotely computed result of the first entity from the remote data source.

17. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 14 wherein the computer process further comprises evaluating the one or more expressions of the second entity against the designated local data to yield the locally computed result.

18. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 14 wherein the one or more expressions of the first entity specify a symbolic representation of a computation to be performed on the designated data of the remote data source, wherein each expression is solvable by an expression engine of the remote data source.

19. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 14 wherein the first entity defines an output communicating to an input of another entity of the description, wherein the data value at the output is the remotely computed result.

20. The one or more computer-readable storage media of claim 14 wherein an input of an entity is formatted to accept an output of another entity.