Overview Business Intelligence Cherry Tree amp; Co..ppt

Business Intelligence Overview Source: Cherry Tree Co. What is Business Intelligence? “Business Intelligence (BI) applications are decision support tools that enable real-time, interactive access, analysis and manipulation of mission-critical corporate information.” The goals for Business intelligence projects are to provide information used to: Support internal enterprise users in the assessment, enhancement and optimization of organizational performance operation. Deliver critical business information to end-users about value chain constituencies such as customers and supply-chain partners. End-users can utilize the BI tools to drill-down and slice and dice to gain a better understanding of transactional and operational information; for example, Star Schema and OLAP are usually used for provide this functionality. Business Intelligence Business Intelligence Tools Introduction Operational Data Source: Business Intelligence system collects data from various sources including operation database, OLTP, ERP, legacy apps, external database and etc. ETL tools (Extract, Transform, Load) are used to pull data from source database, transform the data so that it is compatible with the data warehouse and then load it into data warehouse. A Data Warehouse is a Subject-Oriented, Integrated, Time-Variant, Nonvolatile collection of data in support of decision making. Data Warehouses tend to have these distinguishing features: (1) Use a subject oriented dimensional data model; (2) Contain publishable data from potentially multiple sources and; (3) Contain integrated reporting tools. Data Warehouse usually adopts “Star Schema” data structure for optimizing the performance of data analysis and reporting. Star Schema A Star schema is optimized for data analysis as is typically required in a Decision Support System. A star schema has a fact table surrounded by dimension tables Data Mart A data mart is a repository of data gathered from operational data and other sources t