## Working with data sources

To access data for a BIRT report, you use a BIRT data source. A BIRT data source is an object that contains connection parameters. Before you actually begin to create a data source or multiple sources for your first reports, you need to consider the issue of project and resource organization. If you do plan to re-use a data source in multiple report projects, you can create that data source in a library and reuse that data source from the library. The advantage of this approach is that updates to the BIRT data source in the library are subsequently available to all reports that use the library.

When you create a report design, you use the data explorer, as shown in Figure 2-1, to create and manage BIRT data sources. BIRT Report Designer supports using as many data sources as necessary for the report design. The data sources can be of different types. For example, you can use data from an RDBMS database and data from a flat file repository in the same report design.

Figure 2-1 Data source in the data explorer