What is BI?
Business Intelligence is commonly known as BI in the industry and it has wide variety of implications in projects. It is purely depend on the organizational business model and having the capability of demonstrate the current status and the future status of the organization. As well as it would help the top management to make reliable decisions towards the success.
BI is used to demonstrate the statistics of the organization most commonly for financial status. As an Example, we can create a nice looking interactive dashboard which contains various kind of graphical representations for financial statistics.
How BI works?
BI can be divided in to few parts- Analysis, Integration and Reporting. But the biggest mistake the people are doing is forgetting the core of the BI which is Data Mining.
Most of the larger organizations have millions of records (which may be sales transactions). By looking in to the database itself, it is hard to get an idea about the status of the company. What we can do is, we can analyse the database using several criteria. But it takes lot of time.
Then What we can Do?
As the first step we have to identify where the transactions are stored. Because organizations may not have only one database to store transactions (data). It might be 1 database per branch. Lets assume the organization has 5 databases which are connected in a network.
Our next step is to create a separate database which will use to store all the transactions which are already stored in 5 databases. BUT we should (must) store those transactions in a meaning full way. Otherwise it would not be useful any more. We have two type of designs to consider for this.
1. Star
2. Snowflake
We called them as schema s (those will be describe in later)
Next step is to load the transactions (data) from the source databases to the newly created database (We called this database as the Data Warehouse). We can use SSIS for loading which is going to be discussed in later)
The last step to analyse the data warehouse (the newly created database) and create the dashboards (or Reports) using SSRS.
