Operational Reporting Using Navigational SQL

Ad-hoc analytics on top of OLTP data provides direct business value in that business users can directly interact with the system to gather information for decision-making. From a business user perspective, SQL requires - for a schema that is never changed - deep schema knowledge in order to express navigation along join paths even for simple queries. In this paper we introduce navigational SQL, a language that provides constructs specifically tailored for data retrieval in the context of operational reporting, such as a navigation operator that has explicit knowledge about join paths in a particular schema and gives the user an "application level view" of the tables. We motivate NSQL using examples from operational reporting and outline its benefits over materialized views and domain specific languages, which could also be used to address the issues with SQL described above fully or in part.