BIRT - the Eclipse-based "Business Intelligence and Reporting Tool"is a versatile system to create high quality reports in various formats reading data from a number of sources. Information from the system can be formatted, filtered, processed and exported in various formats (doc, pdf, html, xls). Information can also be stored in a hypercube and output from the hypercube can be generated. This facility enables the users to create reports in an easy and user friendly manner

The BIRT-Interface (an ADO-Driver) connects the system via an erSQL (entity-relationship Structured Query Language) to the BIRT (Business Intelligence and Reporting Tool).

erSQL is the Metasafe Query Language to retrieve information from a Metasafe Repository in an easy manner. This example explains the difference between the SQL access to a relational DBMS and the erSQL access to the metasafe repository. (The example is published in the BIRT Field Guide).