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

Performing window functions in SQL Server


While most functions and calculations are performed at the reporting level with dashboards and reports, sometimes it may make sense to perform some of these functions at the database level. Some calculation functions are rather complex and can be taxing at the desktop reporting level, but the database on the server level may be more adept at efficiently handling the calculation. Additionally, if the calculation function is performed at the database level, it will provide the same value to all users and maintain consistency. These functions are referred to as window functions as they occur over a defined number of rows and columns. The three main window functions we will cover are as follows:

  • Rank

  • Sum

  • Avg

Rank functions in SQL Server

Ranking is fun! Just ask any college football team. One of the most common functions is to rank a dimension based on a measure from best to worst or first to last. We can apply this function using RANK() over (Order...