EDW is a set of tools to build applications that deal with information, such as front-ends for Data Warehouses. These tools allow you to build custom applications that will offer the following features:
ETL: extracting, consolidating, cleaning, converting, importing data from a number of heterogeneous sources into the database.
Data browsing: exploring the tables of the DW (or any database) with advanced features such as customizable searches/filters, lookups and master/detail structures), all based on a model that can be created automatically from the database schema.
Data editing: inserting, modifying and deleting data, with customizable (possibly complex) business rules to enforce data integrity.
Reporting: EDW integrates several different reporting engines (including but not limited to the high quality OpenOffice.org open source suite) to create simple or complex reports that can be exported in many different file formats and/or sent/published in different ways.
Multi-dimensional analysis: creating interactive analysis "cubes" with advanced features such as slicing, drill-down, rotation, projection, analysis, charting, ability to extract the data in different formats and produce reports.
EDW comes in pre-built form, which means that you can use the EDW executables as-is, customize them by means of external configuration and catalog files, and deploy the resulting application. For a higher degree of customization, Delphi developers may also write Plugin packages to extend EDW, or even rebuild EDW itself from the sources.
The main EDW executables are the EDWConsole GUI application and the EDW command-line application. Both of them include the ETL and reporting features, while EDWConsole adds the data browsing, data editing and multi-dimensional analysis features. The command-line EDW is designed to be used in batch mode, at scheduled dates and times, while EDWConsole is an interactive desktop application (it might also act as a fat client in a Client/Server architecture, and in the future as a thinner client in a three-tier scenario).