Monday, June 28, 2010

Business Intelligence - Overview

Hello guys,
Confused with this post’s title, as you expected something else from this blog. Sorry to disappoint you, but now a days I am trying my hand with BI , so i desperately want you people to know that. So please bear with me. If u can’t you can press that cross button waiting for you on top right corner of your window.

So….now let’s get bit serious and start

What is BI?
As far as I know

Business intelligence (BI) is a broad category of applications and technologies for gathering, storing, analyzing, and providing access to data to help enterprise users make better business decisions. BI applications include the activities of decision support systems, query and reporting, online analytical processing (OLAP), statistical analysis, forecasting, and data mining.

For more technical definition you can visit Microsoft’s site

Business intelligence usage can be categorized into the following categories:

1. Business operations reporting
The most common form of business intelligence is business operations reporting. This includes the actuals and how the actuals stack up against the goals. This type of business intelligence often manifests itself in the standard weekly or monthly reports that need to be produced.

2. Forecasting
Many of you have no doubt run into the needs for forecasting, and all of you would agree that forecasting is both a science and an art. It is an art because one can never be sure what the future holds. What if competitors decide to spend a large amount of money in advertising? What if the price of oil shoots up to $80 a barrel? At the same time, it is also a science because one can extrapolate from historical data, so it's not a total guess.

3. Dashboard
The primary purpose of a dashboard is to convey the information at a glance. For this audience, there is little, if any, need for drilling down on the data. At the same time, presentation and ease of use are very important for a dashboard to be useful.

4. Multidimensional analysis
Multidimensional analysis is the "slicing and dicing" of the data. It offers good insight into the numbers at a more granular level. This requires a solid data warehousing / data mart backend, as well as business-savvy analysts to get to the necessary data.

5. Finding correlation among different factors
This is diving very deep into business intelligence. Questions asked are like, "How do different factors correlate to one another?" and "Are there significant time trends that can be leveraged/anticipated?"

Microsoft’s approach to BI

Microsoft provides a complete Business Intelligence (BI) offering that helps decision makers improve business performance at strategic, tactical, and organizational levels. It provides a complete set of tools by using which we can build almost any type of BI solution


Integration Services
Microsoft SSIS - SQL Server Integration Services - is an ETL (Extraction ,transformation and load) platform which replaced Microsoft Data Transformation Services (DTS), introduced in the SQL Server 2005 release. In layman terms Integration Services are used to get data from one or multiple data sources, transform that data as per requirements and load it in same or some other database.

Analysis Services
Microsoft SSAS - SQL Server Analysis Services adds OLAP and data mining capabilities for SQL Server databases. The OLAP engine supports MOLAP, ROLAP and HOLAP storage modes for data. Analysis Services supports the XML for Analysis standard as the underlying communication protocol. The cube data can be accessed using MDX queries. Data mining specific functionality is exposed via the DMX query language

Reporting Services
Microsoft SSRS - SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) uses flexible subscription and delivery mechanisms to help make it easy to create both traditional and interactive reports and deliver them to a wide range of people. SSRS combines the benefits of a centrally managed reporting system with the flexibility and on-demand nature of desktop and Web-based programs.


Notification Services
Microsoft SQL Server Notification Services allows users to create subscriptions to notification applications. A subscription is an expressed interest in a specific type of event. For example, subscriptions might express the following preferences: "Notify me when my stock price reaches $70.00," or "Notify me when the strategy document my team is writing is updated." A notification can be generated and sent to the subscriber as soon as a triggering event occurs. A notification can also be generated and sent on a predetermined schedule specified by the subscriber. Notifications can be sent to a wide range of devices. For example, a notification can be sent to a subscriber's cellular phone, personal digital assistant (PDA), Microsoft Windows Messenger, or e-mail account. Because these devices often accompany the subscriber, notifications are ideal for sending important information.

Replication Services
Microsoft SQL Server Replication Services provides data replication for distributed or mobile data processing applications, high systems availability, scalable concurrency with secondary data stores for enterprise reporting solutions, and integration with heterogeneous systems, including existing Oracle databases. Replication is a set of technologies for copying and distributing data and database objects from one database to another and then synchronizing between databases to maintain consistency. Using replication, you can distribute data to different locations and to remote or mobile users over local and wide area networks, dial-up connections, wireless connections, and the Internet.

Relational Database
SQL Server 2008 offers a security-enhanced, scalable, and highly available relational database engine with improved performance and support for structured and unstructured XML data.





Useful Links:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/bi/default.aspx
http://sqlblog.com/blogs/denis_gobo/archive/2007/12/13/3937.aspx
http://www.collectiveintelligence.com/jahia/webdav/site/ciweb/shared/docs/Presentations/MS%20Business%20Intelligence%20-%20Strategy%20Briefing.pdf


Some good vedios I found:

1. Introduction to Microsoft BI
2. What is BI
3. BI Demo

Wednesday, June 23, 2010


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