US Patent 7383159 Reusable measures

Techniques are presented for reusing business measures within a data store. A measure is associated with a measure type. Each measure is associated with a particular data store schema or schema element and includes metadata for fields and calculations against those fields. Requestors can select existing measures, create new measures, delete existing measures, and/or modify existing measures. A measure, when processed against the data store, produces results from a data store that are associated with the data store schema or the schema element and which conform to the fields and calculations defined within the measure's metadata.