This application is a continuation of co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/345,918, filed Jan. 16, 2003, which is herein incorporated by reference in its entirety.
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to data processing, and more particularly to analysis of query results.
2. Description of the Related Art
As the information accessible to IT solutions becomes more distributed and diversified, it will become increasingly necessary to access information from multiple data sources and integrate the information retrieved into a representation which meets the needs of the application and end users of the application. This information not only needs to be displayed for a user to view or update, but may require advanced analysis techniques to develop knowledge and insights from the data.
Currently, a variety of methods, techniques and products are available to perform these types of analyses. Unfortunately, these conventional solutions require that the data be in specific formats (e.g., specified by Comma Separated Variables, SQL selection from database table, text files, XML representations, etc.) prior to executing their respective analysis algorithms, and in most cases require some knowledge of what the specific fields in the data sources contain (e.g., maximum lengths of character data).
The problem is further complicated by the fact that the input data (i.e., the data input to the analysis algorithms) is typically a subset of the entire data available from the data sources. The user attempting to gain insight from the data frequently cannot predict which combinations of data will be fed into which analysis algorithms. As a result, custom programming is needed to link specific input data retrieved from the data sources into a format suitable for the analysis algorithms and custom programming in the analysis application to accept this specific data. Accordingly, for each query, the fields returned from that query need to be known in advance by the analysis routine. This means that for every query specified by a user, and for every analysis needed, a custom program configured to accept those inputs returned by those specific queries must be written. Therefore, a new query specified by a user and containing different or additional fields, requires a new analysis program. Further, if this same data were to be analyzed by multiple algorithms, each of these new algorithms would need to be developed. These custom analysis algorithms are tied to a specific set of input data and are not available for use with new queries containing different fields.
Therefore, there is a need for a mechanism for dynamically generating input to an analysis environment.
