The Business Intelligence Side of Blue Mountain RAM

Bill Lucas, IT Systems Architect and Senior Software Engineer

Business Intelligence (BI) Basics

BI is an umbrella term for a variety applications Feeds the decision making process Maximize the value of your data Provide evidentiary support Only as good as the source data

Types of Applications

What’s under the BI umbrella?– Reporting– Dashboards / Visualizations– Analytics– Query / Searching– Data mining

Why BI?

There is information in your data you are not consciously tracking

Provide objective evidence to support process or schedule changes

Trend identification and analysis Identify operational efficiencies and cost savings

BI Data Sources

Where does all that BI data come from?– OLTP databases– Data warehouses– Data marts– OLAP cubes– Flat files

Extract Transform Load

Extracting Data

Properly formatted BI data of high quality is crucial to achieving actionable results

BI data come from a number of sources and formats

Little of it is ready to consume and will need to be converted for the next step.

Data are usually moved from the source to a staging area for further scrubbing and formatting

Transforming Data

Transformation manipulates and validates the extracted data once it is in the intermediate format

Typical transformations include– Filtering – Encoding / Decoding– Calculating new values– Aggregating existing values

Loading Data

Once transforming is complete the data is moved to its target location

Data may be moved incrementally or in bulk Data may be appended or overwritten during the

load The data load may perform additional activities

like writing audit details

What’s the Result?

After ETL the data is much more usable to answer questions

Data is organized into facts and dimensions for fast retrieval– Dimensions contain the “Bys”– Facts contain the measures and details– Facts are linked to dimensions by keys

KPIs and metrics

Enterprise BI Deployment

Standalone Deployment

Standalone Deployment?

Consider a standalone deployment when:– No current BI Infrastructure– Enterprise data warehouse isn’t validated– Current BI is already in production and expensive to

modify– Your company deploys BI solutions at the

departmental level

Walk Through

BI home page