What is Business Intelligence ?
In a relational world full of databases, we collect day-to-day transactional data and the database managment system caters efficient management, storage and accessibility of this data. In business, one needs and wants to extract intelligence out of the data that any business would have gathered historically over a long or short period of time. The process of time to time monitoring of the health of business and making strategic decisions based on how the business is performing can be termed as business intelligence. And to extract this intelligence out of the data that any business stores in a variety of systems, one needs to go beyond the relational boundaries of a database, and BI section is aimed at working at this level with the community.
Why Business Intelligence ?
Many developers and DBAs are aspirants of Business Intelligence, but there is also a huge audience who thinks why do I need to learn anything about BI when I have a shining career in the relational world ? I suggest them to read this article of mine, which might change their viewpoint : http://beyondrelational.com/blogs/siddharthmehta/archive/2009/10/14/why-should-i-think-about-microsoft-business-intelligence-when-i-am-an-established-sql-developer-or-a-dba.aspx
Business Intelligence in today's world in not for a niche class, neither for business nor for knowledge workers. It for everyone today, and especially in today's world BI has been a very critical need for any business to survive in this competitive era. Microsoft with it's emergence in Business Intelligence world, has brought BI to everyone's desk. I (Siddharth Mehta) am personally convinced that with the advent of technologies like cloud computing and growingly intelligent query engines reducing the complexities of administration and querying, there would be a day when BI workers would take equal prominance in the industry as any DBA or T-SQL developer, if not more than them.
What is the aim of BI Section ?
Those who are convinced that Business Intelligence has a great potential to boost one's career, but are looking for a platform where they can start their baby-steps on Business Intelligence in parallel with their relational T-SQL and/or DBA sorties, with an educated Business Intelligence community willing to work with them for a mutually benefiting knowledge exchange, in that case you have landed down on the right page. Join this community as a learner or as an educator for a symbiotic growth of knowledge and community, which would effectively lead to career development of the individual and nurturing of the BI community.
Technically speaking, BI Section is focused on Microsoft Business Intelligence related techonologies, namely SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS), SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) and technologies related to them like PPS, MDX, Excel Services and others.
Conceptually speaking, BI Section is focused on Business Intelligence concepts like Data Warehousing, Dimensional Modeling, Performance Measurement, Extract-Transform-Load concepts, Operational and Analytical Reporting and others.
Siddharth Mehta,
BI Mentor, Beyondrelational.com
Join the Microsoft BI community and use the BI Forum for discussing your questions on Microsoft Business Intelligence.
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A collection of beginners articles to get started with Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services. Read More »
A collection of beginners articles to get started with Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services. Read More »
A collection of beginners articles to get started with Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services. Read More »
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Become a BI Author
Are you interested to become a BI author at beyondrelational.com and write short BI articles? If interested, here is a list of topics that you can attempt to write.
- SSRS Report Server in native and share point integrated mode
- Sharing data across different Data Flow in SSIS
- Basic Multi Dimensional Expression Functions
- Challenges around accessing unstructured data from SSIS
- Do I really need a CUBE or PIVOT operator/table?
- Merge Join versus Lookup or Merge Join with Lookup?
- SSIS Data-types
If you would like to write an article on any of the topics above, pick your choice and get an approval from us so that we can block others from picking up the topic. Send an email to bi@beyondrelational.com with your choice. Start writing only after you get a ‘go-ahead’ from us.
There is no rules for the length/size of the article. It should be good enough to cover the topic with enough clarity and the content should be original. The article will be reviewed by our editorial team before it is published.
If your article is accepted for publishing, we will list your profile in the BI authors section which will give you more visibility and career boost.
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