SQL SERVER – Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence

Business intelligence is a method of storing and presenting key enterprise data so that anyone in your company can quickly and easily ask questions of accurate and timely data. Effective BI allows end users to use data to understand why your business go the particular results that it did, to decide on courses of action based on past data, and to accurately forecast future results.

Data Warehouse
A single structure that usually, but not always, consists of one or more cubes.

Data Mart
A defined subset of a data warehouse, often a single cube from a group. It represents one business unit.

Cube
A storage structure used by classic data warehousing products in place of many. Cube usually present data that is aggregated, rather than each individual item. Cubes present a summarized, aggregated view of enterprise data, as opposed to normalized table sources that present detailed data.

Decision Support System
The term’s broad definition can mean anything from a read-only copy of an online transaction processing (OLTP) database to a group of OLAP cubes or even a mixture of both.

ETL
ETL is abbreviation of Extraction, Transform, and Load.

OLAP
OLAP is abbreviation of online analytical processing.

OLTP
OLTP is abbreviation of online transactional processing.

Business Intelligence
Companies continuously create data whether they store it in flat files, spreadsheets or databases. This data is extremely valuable to your company. It’s more than just a record of what was sold yesterday, last week or last month. It should be used to look at sales trends in order to plan marketing campaigns or to decide what resources to allocate to specific sales teams. It should be used to analyse market trends to ensure that your products are viable in today’s marketplace. It should be used to plan for future expansion of your business. It should be used to analyse customer behaviour. The bottom line is that your data should be used to maximize revenue and increase profit.

All companies produce reports from the data they collect from their business activities. Every manager has a manager who needs reports unless you’re the CEO in which case you just need reports.

IT are the first people to begin the process of creating a report. They need to extract the required data and pass it to the person creating the report. That person then has to spend time manipulating the data to create the required report. This process can take many hours, even days, of effort. And this process needs to be carried out for each and every report that the company requires. Business Intelligence solutions automate the process of extracting data and producing reports thereby eliminating all of the manual effort of IT and the people creating the reports from raw data.