Nowadays, Business Intelligence (BI) is one of the hot topics in most of the job markets around the world. Most companies are establishing or planning to establish a Business Intelligence system and a data warehouse (DW). Knowledge related to the BI and data warehouse are in great demand in the job market. This chapter gives you an understanding of what Business Intelligence and data warehouse is, what the main components of the BI system are, and what the steps to create the data warehouse are.

This chapter focuses on the designing of the data warehouse, which is the core of a BI system. The following chapters are about other BI components such as visualization, data integration, data governance, and so on. A data warehouse is a database designed for analysis, and this definition indicates that designing a data warehouse is different from modeling a transactional database. Designing the data warehouse is also called dimensional modeling. In this chapter, you will learn about the concepts of dimensional modeling.