The main purpose of this introductory chapter was to give you a taste of things to come. After reading the chapter, you should now have a clear understanding of what Business Intelligence is about. In particular, you should have learned that Business Intelligence allows you to better understand the meaning of the information you're gathering, answering the questions about the current status of your business, how it got to be where it is, and where it is headed.
You looked at some basic ideas underlying Business Intelligence, including those related to answering business questions from data, and accessing transactional and historical data. Through a simple example, you learned how easy it is to get an analytical question answered with Oracle BI Discoverer Plus, a powerful Business Intelligence tool from the Oracle Business Intelligence suite.
In the last sections of the chapter, you not only learned about what data Business Intelligence deals with, but also how this data is structured, and what are common techniques often applied to these data structures.
Throughout the next chapter, you'll learn all the necessary steps to install and configure the Oracle Business Intelligence components included within the Oracle Business Intelligence and Oracle Business Intelligence Tools suites.