Wednesday, July 3, 2013

MSBI - A Quick Overview

Today we shall see what technologies/capabilities are involved in order to enable BI and what products/tools does Microsoft provide to help us in this regard.

A quick glance at the below diagram should help us in understanding how MSBI tools work in a collaborative manner to produce reports that support the decision making process.

                                    

The Data Warehouse:

A data warehouse is a repository of an organization's electronically stored data to provide a single, comprehensive source of current and historical information.

The data is cleansed, transformed, catalogued, aggregated and made available to help decision making.

To say that the Data Warehouse is the heart of BI would be an understatement.
 
Microsoft Product to incorporate this -> SQL Server   
 
ETL: (Extraction-Transformation-Loading)

This is the process of extracting data from operational Data Sources (or external data sources), transforming the data which includes cleansing, aggregation, integration, as well as basic transformation and loading the data into the Data Warehouse.

ETL enables businesses to consolidate their disparate data while moving it from place to place, irrespective of format of the data.

Microsoft Product to incorporate this -> SQL Server Integration Services

Analysis Services:

Analysis Services provides a multi-dimensional database (Cube), where data is stored in aggregated format categorized by dimensions (entities), hierarchies, which helps accessing the data rapidly.

 Microsoft Product to incorporate this -> SQL Server Analysis Services

Reporting Tools:                                                                    

Tools that present the data to the end user(Decision Makers and Associates) in much more appealing formats such as tables, matrices, graphs, KPI’s etc.

Microsoft Product to incorporate this -> SQL Server Reporting Services and Excel

Over the next few posts, we shall deep dive into each of the above subject areas.                                                                               

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