Business Intelligence (BI) requires a star schema for efficient analytics. (the difference between analytics and reporting is that reporting requires you to know up front what you want to report and analytics allows you to do ad-hoc reporting). BI operates in most cases from a data warehouse based on star schemas to allow fast and time-based (historical) reporting. Reporting from the operational data sources would jeopardize the transactional/operational systems and in most cases does not allow for historical reports.
An ordinary application based on a persistence engine like Hibernate uses obviously an operational schema - making analytics hard. It would be nice to let Hibernate also update a data warehouse - similar to updating the indexes for text based retrieval.
So when a transaction is comitted, a message (asynchronously) is send to a component that updates the data warehouse. Each operation has a time stamp - allowing time based reporting. You could even use the data warehouse as a kind of trash bucket to restore data that has been deleted inadvertently.
To summarize; the application has three data sources; operational, warehouse and text-indexes.
An application in this way allows for text based search and analytics reports.
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