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

Configuring an ODBC connection


As with all BI tools, our first task will be connecting to data. This process can be accomplished using an ODBC connection. In order to do so, we need to first configure our 64-bit ODBC connection for our SQL Server instance.

ODBC connections can be found in the following location within a typical Windows environment: C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Administrative Tools.

Once you've clicked on the ODBC 64-bit connection, select the System DSN tab, as seen in the following screenshot:

The next step is to create a new connection by clicking on the Add button and then selecting the SQL Server driver, as seen here:

Next we will assign a name to the SQL Server data source. For our purposes, we will name the connection as well as the description as SQLBI, and we will add the server name to complete the configuration process, as seen in the following screenshot:

The server name can always be obtained from the login to SQL Server Management Studio...