The Business Intelligence Side of Blue Mountain RAM
Bill Lucas, IT Systems Architect and Senior Software Engineer
Business Intelligence (BI) Basics
BI is an umbrella term for a variety applications Feeds the decision making process Maximize the value of your data Provide evidentiary support Only as good as the source data
Types of Applications
What’s under the BI umbrella?– Reporting– Dashboards / Visualizations– Analytics– Query / Searching– Data mining
Why BI?
There is information in your data you are not consciously tracking
Provide objective evidence to support process or schedule changes
Trend identification and analysis Identify operational efficiencies and cost savings
BI Data Sources
Where does all that BI data come from?– OLTP databases– Data warehouses– Data marts– OLAP cubes– Flat files
Extracting Data
Properly formatted BI data of high quality is crucial to achieving actionable results
BI data come from a number of sources and formats
Little of it is ready to consume and will need to be converted for the next step.
Data are usually moved from the source to a staging area for further scrubbing and formatting
Transforming Data
Transformation manipulates and validates the extracted data once it is in the intermediate format
Typical transformations include– Filtering – Encoding / Decoding– Calculating new values– Aggregating existing values
Loading Data
Once transforming is complete the data is moved to its target location
Data may be moved incrementally or in bulk Data may be appended or overwritten during the
load The data load may perform additional activities
like writing audit details
What’s the Result?
After ETL the data is much more usable to answer questions
Data is organized into facts and dimensions for fast retrieval– Dimensions contain the “Bys”– Facts contain the measures and details– Facts are linked to dimensions by keys
KPIs and metrics
Standalone Deployment?
Consider a standalone deployment when:– No current BI Infrastructure– Enterprise data warehouse isn’t validated– Current BI is already in production and expensive to
modify– Your company deploys BI solutions at the
departmental level
Walk Through
BI home page