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

Importing data into Tableau


As we fire up our Tableau Public application for the first time, we are introduced to the different ways that we can bring data in, as seen in the following screenshot:

Unfortunately, there is no direct means to connect to a SQL Server query. Those connections are only available on the licensed version of Tableau that is available for a two-week trial period. Our best option to visualize query results from MS SQL Server is to export the data into a Text file and then connect to Tableau.

Exporting to a text file

Exporting from SQL Server is quite straightforward. All that is required is to right-click on the result set from the query statement in MS SQL Server and then select Save Results As..., as seen in the following screenshot:

Once the file is saved to a designated location, we can then connect the data results to Tableau Public through the Text File method. As our data is loaded into Tableau, we can view the results immediately to confirm that the numbers...