Business Intelligence (BI) Glossary
Clickstream data
Data pertaining to visitor browsing on a website. Such data can include pages viewed, time spent on page, which page the visitor came from, click path through the site, type of browser, etc. This data is important for analyzing the effectiveness of Internet marketing campaigns.
Conformed dimension
A data dimension that is shared by multiple data cubes.
Cube
The basic structure of data in a data warehouse, analogous to a record in a relational database. A data cube contains dimensions, hierarchies, levels, and members. Each specific data location in a cube is called a cell.
Data mart
A database with similar characteristics to a data warehouse, only smaller and designed for a specific division or department instead of the business as a whole. Several data marts can be combined into a data warehouse using conformed dimensions.
Data mining
The process of finding relevant patterns, trends and relationships in a data warehouse. Data mining software tools are able to find such patterns in large amounts of data.
Data Quality Assurance (DQA)
The process of ensuring the quality of the data entered into a data warehouse.
Data warehouse
A special-purpose database that collects, stores, and organizes comprehensive data about a business for the purpose of viewing, analysis and subsequent decision-making by management.
Data warehousing (DW)
The process of creating, organizing, managing and using data warehouses for business decision-making purposes.
Decision Support System (DSS)
The forerunner of business intelligence software tools and systems.
A computer system designed to assist an organization in making decisions.
Dimension
One of the logical "perspectives" for viewing data in a data warehouse. Dimensions contain one or more data hierarchies, which in turn may have one or more data levels.
Drill down / Drill up
The ability to move between levels of the hierarchy when viewing data.
Hierarchy
The organization of data into a logical tree-like structure, with data dimensions at the top, expanding into constituent data hierarchies, then data levels, then data members, and then data children at the finest level of detail.
Multidimensional Expressions (MDX)
The standard language used to query a multidimensional data warehouse, similar in some respects to SQL.
Metadata
Data that describes attributes of the data itself; for example, type, category, date, author, last modified, etc.
Multidimensional analysis
Analyzing business data that has been organized multiple dimensions, such as time, quantity, geography, sales, etc. Also known as OLAP.
Online Analytical Processing (OLAP)
Analyzing historical (warehoused) business data using multidimensional analysis software. Is also is used to mean data warehousing.
Replication
Copying data from one database or computer to another database or computer.
Schema
The hierarchical or logical organization of data in a database, often expressed using XML.
Structured Query Language (SQL)
The standard language for accessing and querying a relational database in order to get a specific view of the data.
Snowflaking
Data normalization applied to a data warehouse that is organized using a star schema.
Star schema
Organizing data in a way that allows business information to be viewed from multiple perspectives.
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