A system and method for analyzing and reporting data from multiple sources is provided. The system is a foundation for an analytical platform that covers not only traditional relational data, but also a new generation of extensible data formats designed for the web, such as those based on XML (FIXML, FpML, ebXML, XBRL, ACORD, etc.), as well as HTML, E-mail, Excel, PDF, and others. In a preferred embodiment, the eXtensible on-line analytical processing (XOLAP), is a scalable client/server platform that allows the multi-dimensional analysis of modern data types, as well as traditional relational data, by bringing them all into an internal common XML-based model, without the time and expense of creating a data warehouse.