Transcript How Business Intelligence Software Works and a Brief Review of

How Business Intelligence
Software Works
and a Brief Overview of
Leading Products
Jai Windsor
MIS 5973
December 8, 2005
What is Business Intelligence (BI)?
• Yet another IT buzzword?
• “Software that enables users to obtain
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enterprise-wide information more easily”
A strategy to ensure the right information is
available to the right decision makers at the
right time
Working definition- products that are designed
to extract and present data from a data
warehouse (ideally)
Extract and present data…
• Querying capabilities
• Reporting capabilities
• Analysis
– Using reports
– Using Excel
– Using OLAP
• Ideally from a data warehouse, but can be from
other databases, spreadsheets, flat files, etc.
BI Vendors
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Business Objects
Cognos
Actuate
Applix
Information Builders
Informatica
MicroStrategy
Microsoft
Oracle
SAS
Querying CapabilitiesThe Business View
• “Business view”, or metadata layer
• Safe, user friendly environment for
business users
• Generates SQL queries for the user
• IT users can modify or write their own
queries
• “Universe”, “Package”, “Project”
Querying CapabilitiesPrompting the User
• Helps users design their own queries
• Asks users what data they want to see
and how they want to filter it
• Standard report templates with hundreds
of variations
• Do’s
• Don’ts
Querying CapabilitiesComplex Business Questions
• Might seem innocent enough but cause a
huge problem for the BI
• Limited SQL functionality in some casessubqueries, multipass SQL, new functions
like RANK
• Proprietary methods are sometimes slow
and inefficient
Reporting Capability
• Reporting transforms query results from
raw data to meaningful information
• Report design
• Charting
Interactive Reporting as an Analysis
Tool
• The least complicated method of data
analysis
• Investigate trends or exceptions
• OLAP-lite
• Formulas and functions
Report Delivery – Push Strategy
• Report generation scheduled by IT
• “Pushed” to users
• Bursting
• Users can be overwhelmed and stop
reading reports
• Alerts
Report Delivery- Pull Strategy
• Users log on and request (“pull”) reports
• Can create a burden on server
• Schedule-and-pull recurring, heavily used,
complex reports
• Web portals and interactivity
Analysis by Excel
• Excel remains the most popular BI tool in
use
• Familiar
• “Massage” data
• Bursting
• Cheap!
OLAP
• Online Analytical Processing
• MOLAP – Multidimensional OLAP
• Multidimensional data cubes
• Multidimensional and cross-dimensional
calculations
• Response times are fast and predictable
Other variations
• ROLAP – relational structure
• HOLAP – hybrid between MOLAP and
ROLAP
• DOLAP – dynamic OLAP, “personal”
temporary cubes
More on OLAP
• Drill down, drill across
• Drill to detail
• Reporting integration
Cognos Enterprise BI Series 7
• Query Studio and Report Studio tools
• Web-based
• Automatic data ranking
• No problem with date dimension
• Good user-defined report scheduling
Actuate Actuate 8
• Analytics Cube Designer
• Cross-join data from heterogeneous
sources
• eSpreadsheet analysis tool
• No problem splitting data fields
• Good user-defined report scheduling
Information Builders WebFocus 7
• No OLAP architecture, no cubes
• Must learn native scripting language
• “Accordion reports”
Applix TM1
• Newcomer to market
• Seamless integration between OLAP and
reporting
• Displays data in Excel
• Must supply own SQL to build cubes
MicroStrategy 8
• Heavily dependent on proper data warehouse
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design. Must have star schemas to properly
create cubes
Must use lookup tables to create the date
dimension
Not tolerant of dirty data
Integrates directly with Microsoft Office
Better for data warehousing and data mining
than reporting and OLAP analysis
Microsoft SQL Server 2000
Reporting Services and Analysis
Services
• Analysis services supports MOLAP, ROLAP,
and HOLAP
• Easy to configure and define cubes
• One fact table per cube
• Reporting Services is an extension to
Visual Studio.NET 2003 and best left to
developers
• Surprisingly poor integration with Excel!
Business Objects Enterprise 6.1
• Unique DOLAP architecture
• Flexibility and low IT maintenance
Conclusion
• Frees IT staff from being report writes
• Business power users may know better
what they want to know than IT can
• Business users can explore data in new
ways
• Pure players vs platform vendors
Any questions?