Book Image

Practical Business Intelligence

Book Image

Practical Business Intelligence

Overview of this book

Business Intelligence (BI) is at the crux of revolutionizing enterprise. Everyone wants to minimize losses and maximize profits. Thanks to Big Data and improved methodologies to analyze data, Data Analysts and Data Scientists are increasingly using data to make informed decisions. Just knowing how to analyze data is not enough, you need to start thinking how to use data as a business asset and then perform the right analysis to build an insightful BI solution. Efficient BI strives to achieve the automation of data for ease of reporting and analysis. Through this book, you will develop the ability to think along the right lines and use more than one tool to perform analysis depending on the needs of your business. We start off by preparing you for data analytics. We then move on to teach you a range of techniques to fetch important information from various databases, which can be used to optimize your business. The book aims to provide a full end-to-end solution for an environment setup that can help you make informed business decisions and deliver efficient and automated BI solutions to any company. It is a complete guide for implementing Business intelligence with the help of the most powerful tools like D3.js, R, Tableau, Qlikview and Python that are available on the market.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Practical Business Intelligence
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Building a sales query in MS SQL Server


Before we can start visualizing our amazing data in Tableau, we must first put together the query that will provide us that amazing data. We have been asked to put together a sales dashboard that highlights sales from different marketing promotions that have been initiated since the start of AdventureWorks. This promotional data is located in the Sales.SalesReason table in the data warehouse, as seen in the following screenshot:

These results show that there are ten different possible promotions that could have resulted in a sale. The actual sales data is in the Sales.SalesOrderHeader table but that table does not have the SalesReasonID for us to join sales to promotions. The SalesOrderHeader table has a SalesOrderID, as seen in the following script:

SELECT  
distinct [SalesOrderID] 
FROM [AdventureWorks2014].[Sales].[SalesOrderHeader] 

We will need to find a table that can tie SalesOrderID to SalesReasonID. Fortunately, we have a table...