BI Technology

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BI Technology
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Business Intelligence

• Business intelligence is the process of
  extracting data from a database and then
  analyzing that data for information that you can
  use to make informed business decisions and take
  action. For example, business intelligence data
  answers the following types of questions
• How do the total sales of all products for 2001
  compare with the total sales from 2000?
• How does our profitability to date compare with
  the same time period during the past five years?
• How much money did customers over age 35 spend
  last year, and how has that behavior changed over
  time?

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OLTP databases OLTP databases execute
transactions, meaning that groups of records are
added updated, or deleted at the same time. For
example, the database for a grocery store inserts
or updates information about prices, purchases,
and the costs of goods and freight, usually at
lightning speed. However, OLTP databases are not
good at helping you analyze their data. The
reason OLTP databases contain lots of tables,
sometimes hundreds, and those tables often have
multiple relationships with other tables, which
in turn have multiple relationships with still
more tables, and so on. In addition, the tables
can contain millions of records. The resulting
complex structure can be extremely hard to
understand, which makes it difficult to extract
business intelligence data.  Also, OLTP
databases contain individual records, such as
John Smith bought a case of apples from Jane
Doe on April 10th for 5.00. In contrast,
business intelligence relies on summarized data,
such as In December, all stores in sales region
2 sold 5000 cases of soft drinks. If you try to
extract and summarize the data in your OLTP
database, you have to use complex queries that
can take a long time to run. Those queries can
also slow the OLTP database unacceptably. For
example, if you run a chain of stores, your
customers could find themselves waiting in line
while your computer system slowly updates its
records and slowly extracts business intelligence
data. The solution a separate OLAP database.
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OLAP databases
OLAP databases facilitate business-intelligence
queries. They take historical data from OLTP
databases and aggregate it into structures that
permit sophisticated analysis. OLAP databases
contain fewer records, and they use two types of
data facts and dimensions. Facts are numeric
data, the quantities and averages that you use to
make informed business decisions. Dimensions are
textual, descriptive information that give
meaning to the facts. Dimensions typically
contain levels and members organized into a
hierarchy.
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OLAP Databases
OLAP data is multidimensional, meaning it
contains data that resides in multiple
categories/dimensions. OLAP data is
hierarchical, meaning the data in each dimension
is arranged in a set of parent-child
relationships.
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Why do they call it a cube?
The business intelligence industry uses the word
"cube" because it best describes the type of
structure that you analyze. In addition to
providing the totals and subtotals you need to
make decisions, cubes also allow you to find your
answers quickly. For example, say you need to
view sales figures for Region 2, for Day 4, and
Product 1 in the cube depicted above.
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The Business Intelligence System
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BI Terminology