Q1. Define the term business intelligence tools?

Briefly explain how the data from one end gets transformed into information at the other end? Answer: Business intelligence tools. The various tools of this suite are: Data Integration Tools: These tools extract, transform and load the data from the source databases to the target database. There are two categories; Data Integrator and Rapid Marts. Data Integrator is an ETL tool with a GUI. Rapid Marts is a packaged ETL with pre -built data models for reporting and query analysis that makes initial prototype development easy and fast for ERP applications. The important components of Data Integrator include; Graphical designer: This is a GUI used to build and test ETL jobs for data cleansing, validation and auditing. Data integration server: This integrates data from different source databases. Metadata repository: T h i s r e p o s i t o r y k e e p s s o u r c e a n d t a r g e t m e t a d a t a a n d t h e transformation rules. Administrator: This is a web-based tool that can be used to start, stop, schedule and monitor ETL jobs. BI Platform: This platform provides a set of common services to deploy, use and manage the tools and applications. These services include providing the security, broadcasting, collaboration, meta data and developer services. Reporting Tools and Query & Analysis Tools: These tools provide the facility for standard reports generation, ad hoc queries and data analysis. Performance Management Tools: These tools help in managing the performance of a business by analyzing and tracking key metrics and goals. Business intelligence tools are a type of application software designed to help i n making better business decisions. These tools aid in the analysis and presentation of data in a more meaningful way and so play a key role in the strategic planning process o f a n o r g a n i z a t i o n . T h e y i l l u s t r a t e b u s i n e s s i n t e l l i g e n c e i n t h e a r e a s o f m a r k e t research and segmentation, customer profiling, customer support, profitability, and inventory and distribution analysis to name a few. Various types of BI systems viz. Decision Support Systems, Executive Information Systems (EIS), Multidimensional Analysis software or OLAP (On -Line Analytical Processing) tools, data mining tools are discussed further. Whatever is the type, the Business Intelligence capabilities of the system is to let its users slice and dice the information from their organizations numerous databases without having to wait for their IT departments to develop complex queries and elicit answers. Although it is possible to build BI systems without the benefit of a d a t a w a r e h o u s e , m o s t o f t h e s y s t e m s a r e a n i n t e g r a l p a r t o f t h e user-facing end of the data warehouse in practice. In fact, we can never think of building a data warehouse without BI Systems. That is the reason; sometimes, the words data warehousing and business intelligence are being used interchangeably. The below figure depicts how the data from one end gets transformed to information at the other end for business information.