Preface

Business Intelligence (BI) is one of the hottest topics nowadays in the Information Technology field. Many companies and organizations intend to utilize a BI system to solve problems and help decision makers make decisions. This high demand for BI systems has raised the number of job openings in this field.

The following is Gartner's definition of Business Intelligence (http://www.gartner.com/it-glossary/business-intelligence-bi/):

There are various reasons to have a BI system in place, but helping decision makers to make better decisions is one of the main purposes of BI. As an example, a director of a manufacturing company would like to understand the trend of sales in past months (or years) on specific products. This trend would be helpful for him to decide any changes in that product or to create some other editions of that product. A bank directory might like to use data mining solutions to distinguish suspicious or fraudulent transactions. A board of directors would be interested to see Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of their business.

BI could help in all the scenarios mentioned here and many more. A BI system usually uses a data warehouse as a core tool. The data warehouse is an integrated dimensional data structure. Data from a variety of sources will be fed into the data warehouse and some data quality and governance would be applied on the data. The dimensional model of data warehousing is optimized for reporting and analysis, so data visualization tools can directly query against the data warehouse. Another layer of modeling might be added to the BI architecture, OnLine Analytical Processing (OLAP), or the tabular model. These models will improve data access in terms of speed and performance of queries. BI systems have one or more data visualization frontends that will be the GUI for the end user.

In this book, we will go through the BI architecture and explore the Microsoft technologies that can implement and deliver BI solutions.