[Best practice] Heavy background tasks?

[eluser]Clooner[/eluser]
I'm working on a heavy mysql site right now and using CI for the front-end. This site however needs to do a lot of reporting and database querying, thousands of queries will be needed to the generate the reports. Just for testing I have a task page setup that refreshes itself on a set interval. This however won't work in the live site. I think I need to create an app in Java or Python to do this job in the background.

Does anyone know any good articles to read on this subject or has a suggestion on how to do this?