Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence solutions

• A categorization of the different
•        Business Intelligence solutions.
• Data Integration: ETL
• Data Warehousing
• Reporting & OLAP
• CRM softwares
• Not all Predictive Analytic tools
•               are born equal
• Of the utility of the TEST dataset

TIMi Suite added value

• TIMi added value.
• Anatella added value
• Stardust added value

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Data Warehouse

A"Data warehouse" is simply a "centralized place" where you can find all the data of your company. Data Warehouse software are very often simple database: Oracle, Teradata, SQL Server, MySQL,...

You usually use a "Data warehouse" in combination with a "CRM tool" or a "reporting tool". Based on the content of the "Data warehouse", the reporting tool produces "standard reports" like:

• Evolution of your sales over the years, month by month
• Evolution of the number of Acquired customers, month by month
• Evolution of the number of "lost customers", month by month

These classical questions (or requests) usually take lots of time to compute (during which the Data Warehouse system nearly freezes and nobody can use it). So, if you hired good consultants to create your Data Warehouse, they normally created inside your database a "small, special table" that already stores all the answers to these "classical" questions (so that there is no need to re-compute all time the same answers to your different "classical" questions: you only need to consult the "special table" that already contains the answer). This "special table" is re-computed & updated every week or so...

Differences between tools

The differences between all these tools are

• Speed, Scalability, Versatility, Cost of Ownership
  
  All major database systems are equally able to store vast amounts of information. A complete analysis of the advantages of each database system is out of the scope of this simple document.
  
  Some database systems are more focused on "data warehouse" usage than others. Typically, in a "data warehouse", you only have infrequent "big updates" and the rest of the time, the users are only performing queries. So, the databases that are optimized for "data warehouse purposes" have very fast queries. These databases are: Sybase IQ, Oracle Essbase,...
  
  For more information on this very vast subject, see here:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_relational_database_management_systems

Differences in results between tools

The differences in result between all these tools are:

• None: given enough time and enough human resources, you can achieve similar results (similar ROI) with all the above tools.

Next: Review of Reporting & OLAP tools

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