What is Business Intelligence?
Business intelligence is a broad set of applications, technologies and knowledge for gathering and analyzing data for the purpose of helping users make better business decisions.
The main challenge of Business Intelligence is to gather and serve organized information regarding all relevant factors that drive the business and enable end-users to access that knowledge easily and efficiently and in effect maximize the success of an organization.
Business intelligence produces analysis and provides in depth knowledge about performance indicators such as company's customers, competitors, business counterparts, economic environment and internal operations to help making effective and good quality business decisions.
From a technical standpoint, the most important areas that Business Intelligence (BI) covers are:
DW - Data warehousing - architecture, modeling, managing, processing
ETL process and data integration
Reporting, Information visualization and Dashboards
OLAP - Online Analytical Processing and multidimensional analysis
Data cleansing and data quality management
Performance management
Data mining, statistical analysis, forecasting
MIS - Management Information Systems
CRM - Customer Relationship Management
Etl Tools Info portal
ETL-Tools.Info portal provides information about different business intelligence tools and datawarehousing solutions, with a main focus on ETL process and tools. On our pages you will find both general articles with high-level information on various Business Intelligence applications and architectures, as well as technical documents, with a low-level description of the presented solutions and detailed tutorials.
A great attention is paid to the Datastage ETL tool and we provide a number of Datastage examples, Datastage tutorials, best practices and resolved problems with real-life examples.
There is also a wide range of information on a rapidly growing Open Source Business Intelligence market (OSBI), with emphasis on applications from the Pentaho BI family, including a Pentaho tutorial.
We also provide a SAS Guide with tutorial, which illustrates the vision of SAS on Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing and ETL process.
We have recently added a new ETL case study (ETL course with examples) section which represents a set of business cases, each of which illustrates a typical data warehousing problem. We analyze the cases thoroughly and propose the most efficient and appropriate approach to solving that problems by showing sample ETL process designs and DW architectures.
Microsoft users may be very interested in exploring our Excel BI crosstabs section with FAQ and sample solutions.
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