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

Developing views in SQL Server


For the remainder of this chapter, we will focus our attention on Microsoft SQL Server functions and procedures that will help us understand and manipulate our data. The more we can manipulate our data to a desired outcome at database level, the less manipulation will be needed by BI developers, data analysts, or business users at the reporting level. This will make for a happy customer.

Quite often, a developer will find themselves querying the same results over and over again with minor changes to a filter a name or a filter a date on regular basis. This type of query is a good candidate to be converted into a view within SQL Server. There are certain advantages to creating a view compared to using the actual table for a query:

  • Views can consolidate results from several tables with complex joins into a single location for user access

  • Views can apply security on tables by restricting results on what is appropriate for a specific audience on the backend rather...