Frequently Asked Questions on Business Intelligence
What is business intelligence?
Business intelligence is a sofware platform consisting of a multi-dimensional database (called a data warehouse) and special software tools (OLAP browsers) that allow one to make sense of large amounts of data. Business intelligence enables managers and sales people to make better corporate decisions, increase profitability, and reduce time spent analyzing customer data.
What is the goal of business intelligence software?
The goal of business intelligence is to convert raw data into useful business information and knowledge through the use of sophisticated data queries, data visualization, and reporting. Business intelligence software allows one to see relevant patterns, trends and relationships in large amounts of data.
What is the difference between business intelligence and data warehousing?
Business intelligence is the use of specialized tools to access, query and visualize large amounts of data that resides in a specialized database called the data warehouse, discern patterns and trends in the data, and subsequently enable managers to make smarter business decisions based on the information gleaned.
Data warehousing is the collection, storing and organizing of data in a multidimensional database using a tree-based hierarchy. Data warehousing does not require business intelligence tools to access the data, other reporting tools can generate reports from the data warehouse, just not as effectively.
How is data structured in a data warehouse?
Data is organized into a logical tree-like structure, with data dimensions at the top, expanding into data hierarchies, then data levels, then data members, and then data children at the finest level of detail. In this way, people can visualize large amounts of data and see relevant patterns using business intelligence tools.
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