Forbes.com: Analyze This "Despite the software slump, sales are booming in business intelligence, a new tool that promises relief for performance anxiety." ... "The trick to the software is a built-in translator called a semantic layer that Business Objects patented ten years ago and that it claims is widely imitated by rivals. It turns queries such as "sales of TV by region to men under 40" into dozens of lines of database gobbledygook that fetch and combine answers from sales, inventory and customer databases"