A system and method for analyzing data is described, in which an application programming interface (API) is provided to permit an online analytical processing (OLAP) application to manipulate data and queries in a model close to the business model the OLAP application was designed to support. A data server is provided to translate between the object-oriented representation and the native database query format. In one embodiment, a multidimensional virtual cursor is implemented to further simplify the logic of the OLAP application.