SQL Business Intelligence

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What is Business Intelligence

Business intelligence (BI) is a broad category of application programs and technologies for gathering, storing, analysing, and providing access to data from various data sources, thus providing enterprise users with reliable and timely information and analysis for improved decision making. BI is an umbrella term that refers to an assortment of software applications for analysing an organizations raw data for intelligent decision making for business success. BI as a discipline includes a number of related activities, including decision support, data mining, online analytical processing (OLAP), querying and reporting, statistical analysis and forecasting.

Business Intelligence for Success

Business intelligence equips enterprises to:
gain business advantage from data anticipate enhanced turnaround time on data collection come up with fresh ideas for novel business initiatives

foresee accurate picture of customer needs and demands

perform more targeted marketing campaigns gain enhanced knowledge that will help it advance its brand into the top slot in terms of market share

cut down its client churn

reduce its overheads and also diminish delays in supply chain

Business Intelligence Scenario

Every day, a dairy company collects from 2,000 stores information which is uploaded to servers at its headquarters at the end of the day. This information is used by the chains main office to instantly analyse key operational measures such as the number of dairy products sold, profits, trends, and so forth.

Next day, by early morning the companys managers receive performance data. Next, they verify current revenue, time required to perform each job, and other performance measures. With BI, franchisees with multiple locations can have consolidated views, as can the companys regional managers.
This scenario clearly explains how implementation of Business intelligence can be very fruitful for an organization.

BI and Business Success

BI can catalyse a businesss success in terms of: Revenues
Distinguish the products and services that drive revenues.

Rank customers and locations based on profitability.

Customer relationship management

Categorize low-value customers and work toward improving their value. Find customer relationship issues early and take timely action to resolve them.

Sales and marketing

Aim at high-value customers to minimize marketing risk. Rank the success of product promotions based on product and market segment. Find what is in the sales pipeline

ETL operations using SSIS on SQL 2005 & 2008

SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) is a tool that we use to perform ETL operations; i.e. extract, transform and load data. At a high level, SSIS provides the ability to:
retrieve data from just about any source

perform various transformations on the data; e.g. convert from one type to another, convert to uppercase or lowercase, perform calculations, etc.
load data into just about any source define a workflow

The first version of SSIS was released with SQL Server 2005.

Creating SSIS Packages with SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)

SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) provides Import and Export Wizard tasks which you can use to copy data from one data source to another. You can choose from a variety of source and destination data source types, select tables to copy or specify your own query to extract data, and save your work as an SSIS package. You can run the generated SSIS package as is, schedule it to run at a later time, or make any necessary changes to it to fit your needs. Using the Import and Export Wizard is a good starting point for learning about SSIS packages.

ETL operations using DTS on SQL 2000

Data Transformation Services, or DTS, is a set of objects and utilities to allow the automation of extract, transform and load operations to or from a database. The objects are DTS packages and their components, and the utilities are called DTS tools. SQL Server 2000 expanded DTS functionality in several ways. Many new types of tasks were made, including the ability to FTP files, move databases or database components, and add messages into Microsoft Message Queue. DTS packages can be saved as a Visual Basic file in SQL Server 2000, and this can be expanded to save into any COM-compliant language. Packages were also integrated into Windows 2000 security, DTS tools were made more userfriendly, and tasks can accept input and output parameters.

SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS)

SQL Server Reporting Services provides a full range of ready-to-use tools and services to help you create, deploy, and manage reports for your organization, as well as programming features that enable you to extend and customize your reporting functionality. Reporting Services is a server-based reporting platform that provides comprehensive reporting functionality for a variety of data sources. Reporting Services includes a complete set of tools for you to create, manage, and deliver reports, and APIs that enable developers to integrate or extend data and report processing in custom applications.

Reporting Services tools work within the Microsoft Visual Studio environment and are fully integrated with SQL Server tools and components.

SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) contd.,

With Reporting Services, you can create interactive, tabular, graphical, or freeform reports from relational, multidimensional, or XML-based data sources. Reports can include rich data visualization, including charts, maps, and sparklines. The reports that you create can be viewed over a Web-based connection or as part of a Microsoft Windows application or SharePoint site. You can also create data alerts on reports published to a SharePoint site and receive email messages when report data changes. In SQL Server 2012, Reporting Services introduces Power View, an interactive data exploration, visualization, and presentation experience for the Reporting Services Add-in for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise Edition.

Crystal reporting using .NET framework

Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2005 ships with deployment projects that enable you to deploy your application to target machines. Deployment components include report files, Crystal Reports redistribution files and the .NET Framework 2.0 redistribution package. Deployment in Visual Studio 2005 is based on Windows Installer technology. The setup project builds installer files with .exe and .msi extensions. Those files can be distributed for installation on computers that do not have Crystal Reports or Visual Studio 2005 installed. It is recommended to distribute project files using the .msi Windows Installer technology.

Deployment Overview
To deploy an application, start with a project and add the following components:
Project Output:
Selected files from the project necessary to deploy the application to client machines.

Report Files
Non-embedded reports to be distributed to client machines.

.NET Framework 2.0

.NET components that are necessary for an application to run.

Crystal Reports for .NET Framework 2.0 Windows Installer

Installer technology that sets up Crystal Reports runtime files on target machines without the need to separately add selected merge modules to the project output.

Merge Modules
Components that enable clients to view applications that use Crystal Reports.

SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS)

Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services, SSAS, is an Online Analytical Processing, OLAP, data mining and reporting tool in Microsoft SQL Server. SSAS is used as a tool by organizations to analyze and make sense of information possibly spread out across multiple databases, or in disparate tables. Analysis Services includes a group of OLAP and data mining capabilities. This feature rich tool set offers insight into your data that you know exists, but just don't have an easy way of accessing. By writing queries and reports you can get the sense of certain things that you are looking for, but by utilizing Analysis Services you have the ease of maneuvering through your data with much less effort. This gives you insight to areas that are often overlooked or not even thought about.

Pivot Tables
You can use the PIVOT and UNPIVOT relational operators to change a table-valued expression into another table. PIVOT rotates a table-valued expression by turning the unique values from one column in the expression into multiple columns in the output, and performs aggregations where they are required on any remaining column values that are wanted in the final output. UNPIVOT performs the opposite operation to PIVOT by rotating columns of a table-valued expression into column values. When PIVOT and UNPIVOT are used against databases that are upgraded to SQL Server 2005 or later, the compatibility level of the database must be set to 90 or higher.

OLAP Cubes
An OLAP cube is an array of data understood in terms of its 0 or more dimensions. A cube can be considered a generalization of a three-dimensional spreadsheet. For example, a company might wish to summarize financial data by product, by time-period, and by city to compare actual and budget expenses. OLAP data is typically stored in a star schema or snowflake schema in a relational data warehouse or in a special-purpose data management system. Measures are derived from the records in the fact table and dimensions are derived from the dimension tables.

Data Warehouse vs. OLAP Cube?

Data Warehouse
A data warehouse is a database with a design that makes analyzing data easier (often with data from many sources). It is usually composed of fact tables and dimension tables, and often aggregate tables. a data warehouse is a place to store data in an easily analyzable format they compliment each other in that a data warehouse makes it easy to analyze data using OLAP

OLAP Cube
OLAP is a set of operations that one can do on a data set, for example pivoting, slicing, dicing, drilling. For example, one can do OLAP operations with MS Excel PivotTables. OLAP is a method to analyze data. OLAP can make analyzing a data warehouse faster.

Data Mining
Generally, data mining (sometimes called data or knowledge discovery) is the process of analyzing data from different perspectives and summarizing it into useful information - information that can be used to increase revenue, cuts costs, or both. Data mining is primarily used today by companies with a strong consumer focus - retail, financial, communication, and marketing organizations. With data mining, a retailer could use point-of-sale records of customer purchases to send targeted promotions based on an individual's purchase history.

Data mining software analyzes relationships and patterns in stored transaction data based on open-ended user queries.

Data Warehousing
A data warehouse is a relational database that is designed for query and analysis rather than for transaction processing. In addition to a relational database, a data warehouse environment includes an extraction, transportation, transformation, and loading (ETL) solution, an online analytical processing (OLAP) engine, client analysis tools, and other applications that manage the process of gathering data and delivering it to business users. the characteristics of a data warehouse are:
Subject Oriented Integrated Nonvolatile Time Variant

Dashboards
Dashboards often provide at-a-glance views of KPIs (key performance indicators) relevant to a particular objective or business process (e.g. sales, marketing, human resources, or production). Dashboards give signs about a business letting the user know something is wrong or something is right. Dashboards typically are limited to show summaries, key trends, comparisons, and exceptions. There are four Key elements to a good dashboard:
Simple, communicates easily Minimum distractions...it could cause confusion Supports organized business with meaning and useful data Applies human visual perception to visual presentation of information

Thank You!

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