•Business intelligence (BI) is defined as a set of concepts and procedures that aid in making business decisions based on the facts.
BI is:
•Collecting and refining information from different sources.
•Analyzing and presenting information in useful ways.
WHY BI?
•Provides easy access to information.
•Consistent view of information.
•Helps in making both long term and short term goals.
•Maintains an adaptive and resilient source of information.
•Provides control access to the data.
DATA WAREHOUSING
•Data warehousing is a means to retrieve and analyze data, to extract, transform and load data.
•BI is accomplished using data warehouses.
DATA WAREHOUSE
•A collection of data from multiple sources
ØWithin the organization
ØOutside the organization
•Includes summary, historical as well as operational data.
•Cleansing of data is required.
TYPES OF DATA WAREHOUSES
•Top-down
ØCentralized.
•Bottom-up
ØDistributed.
ARCHITECTURE OF DATA WAREHOUSE
The components of the architecture are
ØSource systems.
ØData staging area.
ØPresentation server.
ØEnd user data access.
SOURCE SYSTEMS
•A system that captures the transactions of the business.
•Also known as legacy systems.
•Maintains little historical data.
•A stovepipe.
DATA STAGING AREA
•A set of processes that clean, transform, combine, de-duplicate, household, archive and prepare source data for
use in the data warehouse.
•Involves activities of sorting and sequential processing.
BASIC PROCESSES OF DATA STAGING
•Extracting.
•Transforming.
•Loading and indexing.
•Quality Assurance Checking.
•Release/Publishing.
•Updating
•Querying.
•Data Feedback/feeding in Reverse.
•Auditing.
•Securing.
•Backing up and Recovering.
PRESENTATION SERVER
•The target machine on which the data warehouse data is organized and stored for querying purpose.
•Data is presented and stored in a dimensional framework.
•This consists of
ØData marts
ØData warehouse
ØOperational data store
DATA MARTS
•Logical subset of the data warehouse.
•This consist of data restricted to a a single process or a group of related business processes.
•Represented using a dimension model.
•They must be built from conformed dimensions and conformed facts.
DATA WAREHOUSE
•Query able source of data.
•Facilitate reporting and analysis of information.
•Union of all data marts.
OPERATIONAL DATA STORE(ODS)
•This is designed to contain low level atomic data with limited history that is captured in real time or near real time
on a less frequent basis.
•The contents of ODS are updated frequently.
•It is designed to perform simple queries on small amount of data.
•4 types of ODS:
ØClass I
ØClass II
ØClass III
ØClass IV
•The original ODS systems were developed as a reporting tool for administrative purposes. They were usually
updated daily and provided reports about business transactions for that day, such as sales totals or orders filled.
This type of system is now referred to as a Class III ODS.
• With changes in technology and business needs, the Class II ODS evolved to track more complex information
such as product and location codes, and to update the database more frequently (perhaps hourly) to reflect
changes.
•Class I ODS systems arose from the development of customer relationship management (CRM). In Class I
systems, synchronous or near-synchronous updates are used to provide customers with consistently valid and
organized information.
•The Class IV ODS, was recently developed with an added capacity for more interaction between the data
warehouse or data mart and the ODS.
END USER DATA ACCESS:
•Users query, analyze and present information stored in data warehouses to support a business need.
PS : The above concepts discussed as merely based on my understanding. Any misstated information is the result of same.
