BI - Reason for opting ELLER!!

Well, here goes my first ever blog, that too on a subject I was totally unaware of sometime back!! This blog does not describe just about Business Intelligence but the reason for me and many of my peers of coming to Eller. I do not have any previous experience in BI but it was a great feeling sharing the same room with people having a lot experience in that domain. I am excited as I really had to break my head to put my little bit understanding of Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing into words.  

So just a few days back I attended my first BI lecture. Initially it all seemed haywire with due course of time I started to grasp. Before I start talking about BI let me tell you why do we need BI.

Data:

There is a lot of data which is growing day by day. In order to make meaningful decisions this data had to be used smartly.

Information:

 So we use tools that extract meaningful information from this data that can be applied to a particular process to make the best of the decisions.

So what is Business Intelligence? From my understanding it is a set of methods and processes that takes a chunk of data (related or unrelated) and transform into something meaningful that eases the business process and allows them to make better decisions. The data comes from a data warehouse which is basically a central repository for all kinds of data.

Now that we have an overview of the topic let us go a bit in detail. When designing a data warehouse we use a Dimensional Model. It basically contains fact tables and Dimension tables. So, what do these terms mean? Dimensions contain specific descriptive information. For eg.. Time could be a dimension having various attributes like date, month, year. Fact tables usually contain quantitative measures that are of a particular interest. For eg.. Sales of a particular product during a period. Fact tables need not have measures and could be factless. Facts and Dimension tables are usually connected by a schema (Star or snowflake) usually with a fact table in the center and the dimension tables around it.

Data Warehouse & Business Intelligence are very broad terms and can be extended further to topics like OLAP cubes, OLTP, Data Mining, Data Analytics which I will be talking about as the semester progresses. Stay Tuned!!