Business Intelligence and Tools

Unit 15

Unit 15

Implementing Business Intelligence

Structure 15.1 Introduction Objectives 15.2 Business Intelligence Platform 15.3 Business Intelligence Platform Capability Matrix 15.4 BI Target Database 15.5 Data Mart 15.6 BI Products and Vendor The Big Four Business Intelligence vendors 15.7 Summary 15.8 Terminal Question 15.9 Answers 15.10 Case Study 15.11 Glossary

15.1 Introduction
By now you must be familiar with the strategies followed for building a successful BI application. In this unit, you will read about various aspects governing the choice the right platform for any BI. We will discuss about BI products and vendors. The Business Intelligence platform permits to rapidly obtain information from the corporate systems and databases. The BI solutions also protect the business users from the complexities of the database and also its underlying technologies. The BI platform presents the data in the context of common business terms that are intuitive, as well as shared across the enterprise. A BI platform only gives value if the people use it. The BI Capability matrix serves as a high-level guide to understand the technical capabilities of each vendor's shipping products. Data mart is a database which has the same characteristics as that of a data warehouse, and is usually smaller and is focused on the data for one division or one workgroup within an enterprise. The BI platforms to work well with the relevant enterprise and information management applications. The integrated approach along with the fact that many enterprises already have
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the vendors ERP and the information management applications in place is influencing the customers to standardise on one of the BI platforms. Learning Objectives After studying this unit, you will be able to: Explain the factors affecting a platform choice for BI. Identify the factors for choosing specific database. Describe about the data mart and its significance. Identify the BI products and vendors.

15.2 Business Intelligence Platform

The requirement for Business Intelligence (BI) has never been bigger as the gap between the amount of data available and the ability to analyse and understand it is broadening. The organisations relationships often go beyond the enterprise to include the suppliers, customers and investors. Today, it is becoming even more important that the decision makers from those on the shop floors to those in the executive boardrooms to obtain the information they need at the right time and right format. With an easy-to use secure, scalable and extensible BI solution, both the internal and external users can just obtain it. The Business Intelligence platform permits to rapidly obtain information from the corporate systems and databases. It even allows querying, reporting, analysing and sharing within and beyond the enterprise for more useful tracking, understanding and management of business operations. BI platform change the dissimilar, granular information scattered across the multiple systems into a meaningful, reusable business definitions to make the analytical insight across the organisation. For example, a reusable reporting dimension can be defined around how the sales territories are organised, making the other employees to create reports and analyses using the common definitions. As business requirements evolve, the end users can develop new reports and also refine their own analyses, while making sure one version of the truth through the common definitions of business entities, for example the products, markets, the profit margins, and more. If the employees throughout the organisation are going to rely on the Business Intelligence, then it is important to deliver a system that is easy
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and intuitive to use. If the users find the tools difficult to use, or if they require advanced technical knowledge to be successful, then the value of the system gets reduced. Enterprise 6 allows the users to easily generate reports, analyse the data for themselves, and also share the insights regarding the same. The use of the common business terms in combination with the simple drag-and-drop report creation will please the employees at all the skill levels. The integration of querying, reporting, and analysing into a single interface will remove the need to learn many products. Additionally, a personalised BI portal allows the users to save the reports in a custom document hierarchy and also to easily search for the documents using the keywords and other attributes. BI should also allow all the users to get the answers for the specific data needs or the organisational problems. The decision makers require selfsufficiency and independence to generate reports as and when they are needed. This needs the end users to be able to formulate the business questions and also conduct queries and analysis in support of the decisionmaking process. Compared to other BI platforms that need IT to generate reports or custom build Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) cubes, the Business Objects allows the business users to access and analyse the data themselves. This ad hoc analysis will result in better understanding of the business issues and also give the organisation the capacity to make decisions quickly and effectively. The BI solutions also protect the business users from the complexities of the database and also its underlying technologies. The BI platform presents the data in the context of common business terms that are intuitive, as well as shared across the enterprise. The end result is that the users can spend less time in gathering the information and more time in analysing it to make more effective decisions. An original semantic layer insulates the business users from the underlying data complexity. The Business Objects users can get immediate insight into the data with the on-report analysis. The powerful analytic functions will permit quick drill down into the data, for example, from the region to state to city, or slice and dice to get different views of the data, for example, the sales by product or the sales by region.

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The other one-click functions such as the table pivot, the monthly variance, the ranking, the alerts, and the filters can help in understanding the information. These types of calculations give important analytical value-add on top of the raw data from the source systems. Best-in-class web-based reporting and analysis Usually, accessing the analytic information through a web browser restricted the users to simplistic reports, and little if any interactive analysis. The Web Intelligence gives the power of the web to reach the broadest audience of internal and external users at the lowest possible cost, delivering intuitive and rich analysis to the thin-client users. Web users can access and also create new reports, sort and filter data, add calculations and advanced formatting, drill down to explore the information in greater detail, or drill it through to other related reports. Leveraging the information assets Important data is often spread across a wide range of sources and systems. The report needs information that is in the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and other application systems, as well as spreadsheets, OLAP databases, or data warehouses. The BI platform can access and leverage all these data sources, bringing together the right information to make sure that a complete picture of the enterprise is available to drive the important business decisions. For example, within a single report user can combine data from a data mart with the data from a spreadsheet, plus additional data from an OLAP cube or a CRM system. The semantic layer within the BI platform insulates the users from the particular data constructs and complexities of all of the underlying sources. Serving the needs of every user The platform querying, reporting, and analysing products will deliver easy-to-use analysis to all kinds of users. Whether accessing information in a thin-client environment with Web Intelligence, Creating reports in Windows, or analysing data in Microsoft Excel, the BI platform makes sure that all the employees leverage the same common business definitions and information to give a consistent basis for decision making across the enterprise.
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People at all levels of an organisation are responsible for making decisions which can affect the enterprise performance. And in todays extremely competitive business environment, good decision making needs access to accurate and timely information throughout the organisation, along with the ability to share knowledge with the partners and the customers. With Enterprise 6, delivery of the precise and significant information to the mass audience through the report broadcasting can be obtained. The Enterprise 6 serves the needs of the organisation, the partners, and all the business users by giving Business Objects Info View, a business intelligence portal, and Business Objects Broadcast Agent, a mechanism for distributing information in different formats including the Business Object reports, Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML), Excel, and Adobe Acrobat. The users can schedule or send reports based on the alert criteria to make sure the timely information delivery. Comprehensive delivery options While delivering the information to the mass audience, it is vital to give an interface that serves all the users, irrespective of the analytic or the technical skills. Thus, the information delivery process will have to be both intuitive and easy to follow. Moreover, it has to support the popular formats and the tools that the users can expect. The Enterprise 6 will provide the information in the format designed to support all the required skill levels. Users can access the information and the reports through the portal or the dashboard, through email, or through generally used desktop applications like the Microsoft Excel and the Adobe Acrobat. Whatever may be the information delivery preference, all the users will have to get the value from the BI Information in the right format and at the right time, whether accessed by the employee over the intranet, or by the customer or partner through the extranet. The Information Delivery options will support the popular formats such as the HTML, Adobe Acrobat and Microsoft Excel. Performance and scalability Getting the most out of the BI solution requires the enterprise-class performance and the scalability. The users will expect fast response times
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as they navigate and analyse the data irrespective of whether the system is deployed to a few users in the department or to thousands of users across the enterprise. The BI platform gives fast response times to the interactive users in the small or the large deployments. The Comprehensive auditing will allow continuous refinement and tuning of the information resources. Centralised administration and security The users information requirements can differ based on the job role, the department, the specific projects, and factors. However, some information may be sensitive, so that only certain users or groups will be allowed to access it. The BI platform gives a robust security model that integrates with the existing security and the authentication systems, making sure that the users can only access the reports and the information planned for them. Information is the organisations most valuable asset, and will have to control who can have access to it. To extend the business intelligence solution to the suppliers, the partners, or the customers, it can become even more significant to make sure a secure environment that can give both the control and the flexibility, from anywhere and at any time. Continuous refinement of the information resources A BI platform only gives value if the people use it. Reports have to answer the end users most important business questions. Further, the information overload can result in the wake of not used or unwanted reports. The BI platform is the only BI solution which gives report auditing capabilities to help the organisation in understanding the reports which can be used by the largest number of users, and the reports which are of no value to the end users. This information can be used to improve the target and to tune the available reports to make sure that the users obtain maximum value from the available reports. The most valuable BI platform on the market The BI platform is lessening the gap between the availability of the information and the capability to analyse and understand it. This is because it is easy to use, secure, scalable, and extend, so both the business and the technical users can quickly extract the information from the corporate systems and the databases. They can query, report, analyse, and share within and beyond the enterprise for the more effective tracking, understanding, and management of the business operations.
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15.3 Business Intelligence Platform Capability Matrix

The Business Intelligence (BI) Platform Capability Matrix sets the technical details of the BI Platform Capabilities and also valuates the leading BI platform products based on the technical capabilities. The matrix serves as a high-level guide to understand the technical capabilities of each vendor's shipping products. Beyond the vendor selection, the capability matrix should basically be used as an architectural guide to what should be included in a comprehensive and well-balanced BI platform. Organisations should decide the capabilities that are required based on the requirements. The Key Findings are as follows: While the core functionality of the offerings such as reporting, ad hoc query and Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) in the market is reaching similarity, there exists some major differences in each vendors strategy in optimising the query performance. There are three dominant approaches, the conventional pre-calculated Multidimensional OLAP (MOLAP) architecture which loads detailed data into memory, and optimises the relational queries with the aggregate tables, and also caches and multipasses Structured Query Language (SQL). Vendors who have built their technology have better integrated infrastructure than those who have grown through acquisition. However, most of the vendors have done a reasonably good job of integrating dissimilar products by leveraging the same security and metadata infrastructure. Scorecards are difficult to differentiate. Most of the vendors with a scorecard product are able to meet all the requirements requested where the technology is the easy part. The difficult part of deploying a scorecard is defining the key performance indicators, aligning the metrics and then applying it to a performance management methodology. There are 12 capabilities in BI platform and can be divided into integration, information delivery and analysis. Figure 15.1 shows the BI platform capabilities.

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Business Intelligence Platform

Information Delivery

Integration

Analysis

Reporting Dashboards Ad Hoc Query Microsoft Office integration

BI Infrastructure Metadata Management Development Environment Workflow and Collaboartion

OLAP Visualisation Predictive Modelling and Data Mining Scorecarding

Figure 15.1: BI Platform Capabilities

Presently, in BI platform more concentration is on information delivery but the analysis and integration which are the two categories also play an important role in BI deployments. Organisations must boost their analysis capabilities to discover new insights which will lead to competitive differentiation and performance improvement. The BI platforms should improve their analysis capabilities to find out new insights that can lead to competitive differentiation and performance improvement. It should also improve its integration capabilities to put together the analytical insights back into the business at both the strategic and process level. The Information delivery capabilities will always be required to inform the stakeholders to allow them to constantly monitor the performance of the business and also take corrective action when the actual values are different from the projected goals. Only the combination of all the three capability categories (integration, information delivery and analysis) can build a platform which can deliver BI pervasively to the business.

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1. Information Delivery There are four BI platform capabilities in the information delivery category which are reports, dashboards, ad hoc query and Microsoft Office Integration. User organisations are investing heavily in all of these four capabilities which are pulling many vendors including the nontraditional BI vendors into the space. The relative similarity across most of the vendors' information delivery offerings will force most of the organisations to validate the vendor spend in this area. More costly BI platform vendors will have to distinguish themselves in the analysis and the integration categories to maintain the higher prices. a. Reports: This capability allows the creation of formatted and interactive reports with extremely scalable distribution and scheduling capabilities. Interactive reporting allows the users to create, display and save the prompts that will filter the data and the layout of the report. The BI platform vendors should also handle a broad array of reporting styles for example, financial, operational or performance dashboards with data from both the operational and the analytical sources. The reports should allow the cascading parameters. For example, when a user drills down from an annual sales report to a monthly view, this monthly view has to be maintained while going to another report. Finally, this capability should help in easy to search and also navigate the information in the report, as well as the repository of reports. Dashboards: This capability is a subset of reports which consists of the ability to publish key performance metrics to a Web-based interface with the display of information, which includes dials, gauges and traffic lights. Dashboards should give a positive or negative trend indicator and a colour-coded summary which shows the state of each metric compared to an established aim or threshold. The end users should be able to create their own performance metrics. Real-time update of the dashboards to reflect the events or the scheduled updates to the metrics is vital for the BI applications to focus on the operational tasks. Finally, the dashboards should allow the difficult alerts and notifications based not just on one metric but on groups of related metrics.

b.

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c.

Ad Hoc Query: This capability allows the end users to build their own reports by asking for ad hoc queries. A business-friendly semantic layer which hides the difficulty of the underlying data sources is a main ingredient. Conventionally, the ad hoc query capability has been limited to just the data warehouse but, increasingly, ad hoc queries will be aimed at a broader set of sources. Performance is a main issue for the users performing ad hoc queries. Hence, the BI platforms that give this capability should fulfill many requirements to improve the query performance which includes aggregate awareness, caching, multi-pass SQL, query governance, performance auditing and native SQL commands. Another issue is the capability to harness the ad hoc queries created by the end users so that they can be easily turned into standard reports and publishing systems.

Microsoft Office Integration: In many deployments, the BI platform is used at the middle tier to manage, secure and also execute the BI tasks; while the Microsoft Office, particularly Excel, will act as the BI client. At a minimum, the BI platforms must be able to give the reports in the Excel while keeping the report format and allowing the Excel users to easily refresh the data. Increasingly, the BI platforms are able to deploy all the conventional functionality such as parameterised reporting, dashboards, scorecards and OLAP in an Excel client. Some of the BI platforms extend the functionality beyond the Excel to include other Office applications, such as the Word and the PowerPoint. The advanced functionality includes the ability to author new reports in Microsoft Office which can be saved back to the middle tier BI server, and the ability to centrally control and secure the BI documents in Office. 2. Integration There are four BI platform capabilities in the integration category. They are infrastructure, metadata, development, and workflow and collaboration. Of all the BI platform capability categories, this is the least mature. Most of the BI platform vendors do a reasonable job of giving an integrated infrastructure, including the security, metadata and administration tools, but some vendors with an aggressive acquisition strategy will find it difficult to maintain. Most of the BI metadata is used as a semantic layer for self-service reporting. BI metadata must play a bigger role in standardising the dimensions, hierarchies, measures and performance metrics across the organisation. However, the BI metadata
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must talk to more applications than just that same vendor's reporting tools. The development environment must go beyond the programmatic Software Development Kits (SDKs) to include more visual development functionality and more dependence on Web services. Finally, as the BI becomes more process driven, the BI platforms will require better integration with workflow and collaboration offerings. a. Infrastructure: To assess this category, each BI platform has to be integrated, including the common security, metadata, administration, portal integration, object model, query engine and also shared lookand-feel. The real litmus test for the tightly integrated infrastructure is the capability to deploy all the BI functionality with a single installation. Analysts have examined other infrastructure attributes, including the support for workload balance, zero footprint clients, 64bit computing, Ajax, Unicode along with the ability to run on multiple operating systems or databases. Metadata: Strong metadata is the vital capability of a BI platform. Not only should all the tools leverage the same metadata, but the offering should also give a strong way to capture, store, re use and publish the metadata objects. To assess a BI platform's capability in this area, analysts look for a single repository for different types of BI metadata, which includes the dimensions, hierarchies, measures, performance metrics and report design objects. The BI platform vendors were asked if multiple and simplified views of the metadata based on subject area domain could be supported. The data lineage and the impact analysis were also vital requirements. The BI platforms were also assessed on a range of other features, including: the ability to understand the metadata; search ability and openness of the metadata along with the ability to promote and reuse the metadata across various users, developers and application types. Development: The BI platform should give a set of programmatic development tools, along with a Software Developer's Kit, to build the BI applications and also integrate them into a business process and put them in another application. In addition, the BI platform should allow the developers to build the BI applications without coding by using wizards and drag-and-drop tools for a graphical
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b.

c.

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assembly process. The development environment should also support the Web services to do common tasks such as scheduling, delivery, administration and management. d. Workflow and Collaboration: This capability allow the BI users to both share and discuss the information through the public folders or the discussion threads, and also integrate the BI results within the context of a particular business process. With the help of this capability, the BI application can assign and track events or tasks given to particular users. Often, this capability is provided by integration with a separate portal or workflow tool. The analysts evaluate each BI platform's ability to activate a task-specific to the workflow based on the outcome of the BI-generated data. The ease with which the users can build and edit the business rules to automate the workflow was a major requirement.

3. Analysis: There are four BI platform capabilities present in the analysis category. They are OLAP, predictive modeling, scorecards and visualisation. To date, the enormous majority of the organisations focus on just the OLAP capability. But with the increasing interest in the process- and strategy-driven BI, the need for predictive modelling and scorecards will also increase. Predictive modelling is required to determine in before hand the outcome of different business events. This information when used rightly can promote better planning and optimise the business processes. The Scorecards can be used to bring association to the business by making performance metrics and the cause-and-effect relationships which will be visible to the entire organisation. Finally, the visualisation, which uses the best practices to display the data in an efficient manner can be increasingly adopted by the BI platform vendors to make the solutions easier to consume by a wider set of users. a. OLAP: This capability allows the end users to analyse the data with extremely fast query and calculation, performance, allowing a style of analysis known as "slice and dice." This capability can span a range of storage architectures for example, relational, multidimensional and in-memory. The analysts look for the capability of the users to easily define the functions and add or edit the dimension members. The BI platforms also checked the capability to execute sophisticated sorting or ranking, alternate hierarchies, inter-row calculations, asymmetric
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hierarchies and drilling down on measures. Performance attributes, such as the capability to perform Relational OLAP (ROLAP) calculations, where the in-memory aggregations and trickle feed cube loading are also examined. b. Visualisation: This capability allows the different aspects of the data to be displayed more efficiently by using interactive pictures and charts instead of the rows and columns. BI platforms were assessed on the ability to project multidimensional data in a two-dimensional screen with the help of the size, shape and colour of objects to show dimensionality. The capability to project data onto any physical design surface such as a physical store, airplane or stadium can also be examined. Finally, the analysts look for BI platforms that give a wide range of chart types beyond the basic bar and pie charts, to include the chart types such as the heat maps and the geographic maps. Credit can be given to the BI platforms that allowed easy interactivity with the charts. Predictive Modelling and Data Mining: This capability allows the organisations to separate the categorical variables and also estimate the continuous variables using the advanced mathematical techniques. Most of the BI platforms can give basic comparative statistics. The analysts assessed the BI platforms on the capability to build predictive models based on the more sophisticated algorithms performing the analysis such as: o Forecasting o Classification o Attribute importance o Clustering o Affinity analysis o Optimisation The BI platforms were assessed on the capability to handle a predictive modelling Environment which includes: o Experimental design o Data transformations o Model management o Model assessment o Real-time/batch scoring.
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d.

Scorecards: This capability takes the metrics displayed in the dashboard a step further by applying them to the strategy map which aligns the key performance metrics with the success of the strategic objectives. However, the scorecard involves the use of a performance management methodology such as the "balanced scorecard" framework or the Six Sigma. The analysts assessed the BI platforms on the capability to design the strategy maps, support the common scorecard methods, apply the performance management methodologies, encourage the association about the performance metrics, and summarise, display, and group the performance metrics. Most of the vendors with a scorecard product were able to meet all the demands requested. Some of the vendors without a formally designated scorecard product were able to show some scorecard functionality with the reporting and dashboard products.

Activity 1: CVD is Manufacturing Company which is using the BI tool to help its business activities including the sales department and the finance department. List the benefits that the Company has got by using a BI tool. Self Assessment Questions 1. MOLAP stands for __________________. 2. The ___________ users can get immediate insight into the data with the on-report analysis. 3. Strong ____________ is the vital capability of a BI platform. 4. ___________ is a main issue for the users performing ad hoc queries. 5. There are 13 capabilities in BI platform. (True/False)

15.4 BI Target Database

Converse to the data-in philosophy that is the data entry of the operational systems, the data-out philosophy that is the reporting and querying of the BI applications consists of the following design considerations: The BI target databases are designed for the simplified, highperformance data retrieval, and not for the efficiency of the data storage and maintenance which is vital design considerations for the operational databases.
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The data redundancy elimination or minimisation of the data redundancy is not a goal in designing the BI target databases. If a choice has to be made, then the data redundancy is chosen over the complexity, but the redundancy will have to be controlled. The redundant data will have to be consistent and reconcilable.

The essential presumptions for designing the BI target databases are: The data is stored in a way that it is easily accessible in ways that are of interest to the business people. The design is driven by the access and the usage. The normalised design is not essentially instinctive for a business person and can therefore become quite complex. The BI data cannot be invented. All the data in the BI target databases should be present in or be derivable from the current internal or the external operational data sources. A main decision for all the BI applications is at what level, and whether or not, to store the summarised data in the BI target databases. The database administrator and the lead developer will have to choose to store both the detailed and summarised data, either together in the same BI target database or in the different BI target databases. This database design decision should be based on the access and the usage requirements. Logical Database Design As there are differences in the goal and purpose between the operational systems and the BI applications, various database design techniques have been prepared for the BI target databases. The highly denormalised designs store the aggregated and the summarised data in a multidimensional fashion. The logical database designs are documented as the physical data models along with the technical metadata. The aggregation and summarisation are possibly the most important contributors to the good BI application performance. If most of the business analysts have to see the data summarised, these totals have to be precalculated and stored for the fast retrieval. It is necessary to discuss the level of granularity with the business representative, along with the other business analysts who can use the BI target databases as they will anticipate the database design to let them to drill down to some level of detail.
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The multidimensional database designs support the fast retrieval of a broad range of data. There are two popular multidimensional design techniques and they are the star schema and snowflake schema. The Star Schema Star schema1, is the simplest of dimensional modelling. It consists of few fact tables (or just one) referencing few other dimension tables. The resulting schema resembles a starburst with the central fact table and surrounding dimensional table in radial pattern. In the data is represented as an array of pre-calculated values, called facts, around which the analysis is performed. These pre-calculated facts represent the atomic operational data values which have been presummarised by certain dimensions, such as the customer, the product, and the time. A dimension in the star schema is similar to the entity in a logical data model; it is a business object about the data which is collected for the business process. The star schema reflects the view of the business query. As the name indicates, the star schema has a single object in the middle, called the fact table, which is linked in a radial fashion to many objects, called the dimension tables. The following figure 15.2 gives an example of a star schema which is for a store.
TIME TIME ID DAY OF WEEK WEEK OF MONTH MONTH YEAR CENTUARY SEASON NAME
PRODUCT

FACT

PRODUCT ID PRODUCT NAME PRODUCT CATEGORY PRODUCT PRICE PRODUCT SIZE PRODUCT COLOUR

STORE

TIME ID STORE ID PRODUCT ID CUSTOMER ID DOLLAR SALES UNIT SALES PAYMENT TYPE

CUSTOMER

STORE ID STORE ADDRESS SQUARE FEET DISTRICT NAME DISTRICTLOCATION REGION CODE REGION MANAGER

CUSTOMER ID CUSTOMER NAME CUSTOMER PHONE CUSTOMER INCOME CUSTOMER AGE CUSTOMER GENDER

Figure 15.1: Star schema

1

A schema is a collection of database objects. A schema is owned by a database user and has the same name as that user.

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A star schema has only two levels: A Fact table A series of single-level dimension tables The Fact tables possess many characteristics. It Shows an important business event that is a business activity or transaction, such as s sale or a claim. Is the quantifiable part of the business event and are the columns in the fact table. Relates to the related dimension tables that is the business objects, such as the customer or the product. Will have a long composite key consisting of the primary keys of the related dimension tables that are the foreign keys in the fact table. The number of extremely redundant fact tables will exist for a given subject area. Each of the fact table can contain various aggregation levels of the same data. The Dimension tables have various characteristics. Dimension tables: Are the business objects, which can represent the various views from which the facts in a fact table can be viewed and analysed. Basically have a one-attribute primary key. Are denormalised2 that is the data belonging together from a particular business perspective, such as the roll-up hierarchy, is put together into one table. This will produce some redundant data values, which is acceptable in the design schema. Are short and wide; the tables have reasonably few rows which can be short, but there are many columns in the tables which can be wide. Whenever possible, will have to be shared by the fact tables that is conformed dimensions. Of the time is one dimension with the attributes describing the timestamp, such as the calendar year, the quarter season, the fiscal period, or the accounting period. Some other examples of the common dimension tables are the customers, product, policy, sales representative, region, and store.

Denormalisation is basically applied in the case the database is over-normalised and no. of joins required to fetch the data are too much. It is a purposeful redundancy of some of the data to avoid the overhead of joins.

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Most of the multidimensional DBMSs successfully deal with the optimisation of a large multi-table JOINs. One method for finding whether the DBMS is resolving the query successfully is to look at the optimised plan for the query. For example: If the fact table is the last table JOINed, this is to show optimisation. If the fact table is somewhere in the middle, or even somewhere in the beginning, the DBMS might not resolve the JOIN optimally unless it uses more sophisticated JOIN algorithms. If the DBMS does not use the Cartesian product JOINs, then the DBMS might take the qualifying row keys and relate them to a composite fact table index, or it might apply them through an index intersection against the multiple fact table single- column indices.

In either case, check that the DBMS is executing the multidimensional queries in the most useful manner since the performance depends on it. The star schema is the most accepted database design schema for the BI applications for many reasons and they are: Yielding the best performance for the trend analysis, queries and reports which will include the years of historical data. Providing maximum flexibility for the multidimensional data analysis. Supporting most of the relational DBMS vendors with the changes to the DBMS optimiser. Simplifying makes the complex data analysis much less complicated than with a standard normalised design. It is easier to ask the questions such as the following: o Which insurance broker is providing the most or the least lucrative business? o What are the most regularly occurring types of claims from the insurance broker? o When are the claims occurring? Selecting the address and searching the schemes which require few seeks, are rather only one per retrieval Running many operations in parallel.

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Partitioning Make sure that the tables are partitioned well across the multiple disks. This is mainly important for the Very Large Data Bases (VLDB) where the fact tables can reach many hundred gigabytes. Partitioning allows the data of one logical table to be distributed across many physical datasets. The physical data distribution is based on a partitioning column, which is mostly date. Since, partitioning the column must be part of the table's primary key, partitioning the column cannot be a derived column, and also it cannot contain NULL values. Partitioning allows to keep a back up and to restore a portion of the table without affecting the availability of other portions of the same table which are not being backed up or restored. Clustering The cluster table requirement should be defined, and physically co-locate to the related tables on the disk drive. Clustering is a very helpful technique for the sequential access of huge amounts of data. Clustering is achieved through the clustering indices that decide in which sequential order the rows in the tables have to be physically stored in the datasets. Clustering the primary keys of each of the table has to be done to avoid page splits, that is, to ensure that the new rows inserted into the tables will be kept sequentially on the disk according to the columns in the clustering index. This technique can be used to significantly enhance the performance because the sequential access of the data is the norm in the BI applications. When the rows of a table are no longer kept in the same order as it in the clustering index that is data fragmentation then the performance will suffer and the table will have to be reorganised. Indexing Two extreme indexing strategies are to index everything and the other is to index nothing neither of the two is advisable. Instead of curving to these extremes, index the columns which are regularly searched and have a high distribution in values, such as Account Open Date. Do not index the columns that have a low distribution in values, such as Gender Code. Once which columns to index has been decided, decide the index strategy that have to be used. Most of the DBMSs give various access methods to select from, either a sequential access or a direct access using any of the following well-known indexing algorithms:
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B-tree Hash Binary Sparse

Reorganisations Rarely there will need to reorganise the databases because the incremental loads will have to fragment the datasets over time, and the inserted rows will no longer be kept in a logical sequence. The fragmentation might result in long data retrieval chains and the performance can drop off importantly. Most DBMSs give the reorganisation routines to rearrange the fragmented database in order to get back the space occupied by the deleted data or to move the records from the overflow areas into a free space in the prime data areas. The basic activities involved in reorganising a database are to copy the old database onto another device, re block the rows, and to reload them. This is not a small effort for the BI target databases. The good news is that all the DBMSs can carry out a partial reorganisation routine on the database partitions, which is why the database administrator partitions the BI target databases. Backup and recovery Since the software and the hardware may fail. It is important to set up the backup and the recovery procedures. The DBMSs give utilities to take the full backups along with the incremental backups. Many organisations are under the mistaken impression that the BI target databases can be recreated from the original source data. They forget to realise that it might take a very long time to reestablish the BI target databases if they have to rerun all the early and the historical Extract/Transform/Load (ETL) programs-taking the original source files that are available. Disaster recovery is an issue for the BI applications. If the back tapes or cartridges are damaged during a disaster, it can be hard to recreate the BI target databases, and can take a very long time. From the same reason, many companies prefer to store their database backups in remote locations. Snowflake Schema: In snowflake schema, few dimension tables are normalised and hence the data are further broken into additional tables. The resulting schema resembles a snowflake.
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(For additional information on star schema and snowflake schema, refer to Introduction to Data Warehousing)

15.5 Data Mart

Data mart is a database which has the same characteristics as that of a data warehouse, and is usually smaller and is focused on the data for one division or one workgroup within an enterprise. There are three different views of the place of the data mart in the world of data warehousing. Specialised data marts are created with a subset of the information in the data warehouse. These are easier to use because they only have the specific information that the specific user group will require. The use of many data marts allows the querying load to be spread among the various computers. This can minimise the network traffic. Free-standing data marts are developed, independent from the data warehouse. The information for the data mart might come from just one legacy system and is faster and cheaper to develop a different data mart instead of building an enterprise-wide data warehouse with the data marts got from it. The drawback of the solution is that the company's data will not be integrated and thus violates one of the Bill Inmon's original defining features of the data warehouse. If various separate data marts are built using the strategy, then it will usually contain data that is duplicated and inconsistent. The data mart is the prototype or the first step in the data warehousing process. An enterprise picks the division or the group that would benefit most from the data-based knowledge. A data mart is built with the group's data. The additional type of information is added to the data mart as the time goes on until it is turned into the data warehouse.

Data mart possibly has a marketing advantage over data warehouse. The entire data warehousing process is about creating data-based knowledge and bring that knowledge to people. A warehouse is a place where things are kept away. A mart is a suitable place to buy something. Most of the data warehousing professionals include quick access to the information as a defining feature of the term 'data warehouse'. There are three keys to implement faster and are as follows:
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Follow an iterative, phased methodology: Most of the time can be spent on the project focusing on the particular business value the end user wants and the over several iterations build the solution into the vision Hold to a fixed time for each phase: If two weeks are kept aside for the scope for example stick to the window. Do not extend any phase especially the early ones unless the project is doomed to failure. Avoid scope creep at all costs: Though costly and dangerous in any project like the data warehousing or otherwise, scope creep like while adding feature requests keep creeping in the long past the cutoff point can destroy a data mart effort. By adding the last-minute features and probably add complexity to the data mart with only slight incremental business value if any so the little can put the project at risk.

15.6 BI Products and Vendor

There are different BI products and vendors which are available in the market. According to the use, the BI products can be categorised as Data storage and management, information delivery, query, reporting and analysis and performance management which are described as follows: Data Storage and Management A good scalable data storage and management solution is the core of better business intelligence. To keep up with the growing volumes of data, there is need for flexibility and trustworthy options to help store, manage, and secure it. The data storage and management platform can help to deliver accurate, timely information which contains the details the organisation requires to move the business forward. Data Warehousing OLAP Data Quality Data Mining

Information Delivery Even the best, most appropriate BI information will go unused if it can not be accessed in a timely and a convenient manner. The BI solutions make the

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information to be easily accessed and understood across all levels of the business. Dashboards Portals Managed Reporting Visualisation

Query, Reporting and Analysis BI solutions help to empower the users by providing them quick access to the significant structured and non-structured BI information found in systems across the organisation. Ad Hoc Reporting Production Reporting OLAP Analysis

Performance Management A total performance management cycle should be included deep and up-tothe-minute monitoring and analytics. This challenge is answered by the performance management by giving flexible, easy-to-use tools which can help everyone across the organisation to make informed decisions that align with the companywide objectives and strategy which are: Scorecarding Dashboarding Analysing

15.6.1 The Big Four Business Intelligence vendors Though they are not pure-play business intelligence vendors the IBM, Microsoft, Oracle Corp. and SAP AG own two-thirds of the BI market because they have optimised their BI platforms to work well with the relevant enterprise and information management applications. The integrated approach along with the fact that many enterprises already have the vendors ERP and the information management applications in place is influencing the customers to standardise on one of the BI platforms. The Pure-play and the niche vendors are introducing interfaces that is more interesting to the masses, along with the technology such as the interactive visualisation tools, scenario modelling and data mashups, which can change the way the information, is collected and analysed.
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Another factor helping the niche and the pure-play vendors that push into the enterprise is the propensity of the customers to introduce more than one BI platform to meet the different business needs. As of yet, these trends are not lessening the Big Four's domination, as is showed by the BI strategy plans of the many conference attendees. At home, the auto and the life insurance company based in Canada, funding is dropping for BI efforts, forcing the BI team to prove the Return On Investment of its software, said Mark Liu, the company's BI architect. "We've spent tens of millions on BI and need to consolidate down to one system," he said, adding that the choice most likely would come down to one of the major vendors. BI platform integration across the enterprise is not an easy task but the rating of the Big Four vendors BI features and strategy gives the organisations a few points to consider. Here's the rundown of how the vendors stack up: IBM: There is a reason why IBM is still called Big Blue. Its revenue in 2009 was 950 crores, and IBM has no gaps to fill in its BI platform. However, there are few pros and cons and they are:

Pros: IBM has ample money to invest in the acquisitions and also in launching new services: One is the Business Analytics and Optimisation Services Group, which was introduced this year. This group was started with 4,000 consultants and is investing extensively in BI and has the ability to have a grip in the space that achieves into Corporate Performance Management (CPM). In addition, IBM also invested in predictive modeling and data mining with the acquisition of SPSS Inc, increasing the stake for the ability to give more forward-looking BI. IBM is the hands-down leader as far as the business process management and data quality and integration, as compared to the other BI vendors. Cons: IBM does not make the ERP applications which may put it at a disadvantage in the organisations which have other vendors enterprise applications in place. This leads to questions of how the IBM is being evaluated in the SAP or Oracle shops. Still, IBM tells that it is doing well in these environments over the last year and it is not affecting the BI growth.

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Oracle: The vendor's Siebel and Hyperion products are put together strongly, and the platform is called the Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition suite. Integration is strong between this platform and the vendor's enterprise applications and the middleware stack. Most of the conference attendees also use the Oracle's Database Management System (DBMS). Oracle has one of the most complete stacks which integrate well from the applications.

Pros: The vendor has a stronghold on the DBMS market which continues to fill out the data warehouse offerings and the latest of this is the Exadata V2. Oracle clearly has a long history with very big data warehouses with solid mixed workloads. Exadata has made a big difference over the last one and a half years to put them in the leadership position. Oracle is also addressing the data quality and the integration gaps in the BI platform with the purchase of the Silver Creek Systems Inc. Cons: Inspite of being late to the data-quality and the data-integration game Oracle has made a minor data integration tool acquisition over the years which include Sunopsis SA where the acquisition of the Sun Microsystems remains a huge undertaking. Right now the big issue is the integration of the Sun into the company which is going to be a major effort for Oracle. Microsoft: The software vendor is taking a very common approach to the customer penetration with its BI platform: low-cost bundling. The BI abilities are being built into and across many of the product lines including the SQL Server, SharePoint and Office.

Pros: The SQL Server comprises of reporting, Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) and Online Analytical Processing data mining. The dashboards, scorecards and social software enterprise search if the abilities are being included to the SharePoint 2010. The Office Excel now has higher ad hoc analysis, along with the PowerPivot, which gives the users the power to collect data to the desktop from various sources. The Microsoft's BI platform is especially strong for the production reporting for the organisations with a Microsoft-centric infrastructure. Cons: Microsoft is leaving the budgeting and the planning up to the partners since it dropped those capabilities from PerformancePoint Server which is not necessarily a drawback. As far as the availability of the data quality
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tools, the vendor is missing in action inspite of the acquisition of the Zoomix a few years ago. The low-cost data warehouse offerings have catapulted the Microsoft into a leadership position, but not at the high end of the market more than 5 terabytes to 10 terabytes, she said. Microsoft is planning to begin the SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel to the Data Warehouse with huge parallel processing, as a result of the acquisition of the DATAllegro Inc. SAP: The vendor has a desirable customer base which is running the huge workloads on its BI and CPM platforms, said Gartner analyst Bill Hostmann. It is the customer base which is posing some problems for the SAP. Many customers buy the products from SAP because the integration across its product lines is easy. But is not the same for the existing customers of the SAP's BusinessObjects BI platform and the Outlooksoft CPM offering. BusinessObjects and Outlooksoft customers tend to buy the best of breed and not an integrated stack. This seperated sales strategy is a challenge for them.

Pros: SAP is creating the next-generation semantic layer into BusinessObjects, and is also exploring the in-memory database technology with its NetWeaver Business Warehouse Accelerator. SAP is actually bringing down some of the query performance on the business warehouse product to very good levels and to have to balance the innovations against the multiple product segments." Cons: Since SAP has multiple product lines the customer support is still a problem. They have been at the low end in terms of the customer support and are putting a lot of focus on the customer support program to manage and regain the customer credibility and confidence in terms of support. Activity 2: ZXC Retail Company is planning to opt for the Microsoft BI tool to help in the business operations. What are the Pros and Cons of using this tool? Self 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Assessment Questions The ________ reflects the view of the business query. Dimension tables ill have to be shared by the _________. CPM stands for ____________________. A __________ is a place where things are kept away A star schema has only two levels. (True/False)
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15.7 Summary
The Business Intelligence platform permits to rapidly obtain information from the corporate systems and databases. BI platform change the dissimilar, granular information scattered across the multiple systems into a meaningful, reusable business definitions to make the analytical insight across the organisation. The BI solutions also protect the business users from the complexities of the database and also its underlying technologies. The BI platform presents the data in the context of common business terms that are intuitive, as well as shared across the enterprise. The Business Intelligence (BI) Platform Capability Matrix sets the technical details of the BI Platform Capabilities and also valuates the leading BI platform products based on the technical capabilities. Data mart possibly has a marketing advantage over data warehouse. The entire data warehousing process is about creating data-based knowledge and bring that knowledge to people.

15.8 Terminal Questions

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Explain Business Intelligence Platform. Explain Business Intelligence Platform Capability Matrix What are BI target databases? How do to implement data mart? Name the Big four BI vendors.

15.9 Answers
Answers to Self-Assessment Questions 1. Multi-Dimensional Online Analytical Processing 2. Business Objects 3. Metadata 4. Performance 5. False 6. Star Schema 7. Fact Tables 8. Corporate Performance Management 9. Warehouse 10. True

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Answers to Terminal Questions 1. Refer Section 15.2 2. Refer Section 15.3 3. Refer Section 15.4 4. Refer Section 15.5 5. Refer Section 15.6

15.10 Case Study

GSF Juice is a leading provider of healthy, on-the go food and beverages in India. It has around 60 stores all over India. The economic downturn caused hindered the companys growth which made them to reconsider their processes and also look for efficiencies. The company decision makers wanted to start using new technology across its juice stores as a way to support the increased productivity and the profit ultimately. The store managers in the past have had trouble in finding the information that was required to run the stores effectively. The company used to keep a folder on the company wide shared network drive. This folder used to contain more than 1500 documents that the store mangers had to access in order to manage the business ranging from the equipment manuals and store directories to tax information forms and marketing guides which could be found in the original folder. The store mangers found it difficult to manage the time to manually update the stores profit and loss and other main information that the district and the regional manger required. The employees were not sure about the integrity of the data collected because of the conflicting set of metrics between the stores and the corporate resources. So, the company decided to invest in the integrated technology tools that would help the stores to run more efficiently and streamline the communication. So, the best option for this was to use a BI tool available in the market. This helped the store to identify the individual, the store and also the district achievements. It also helped to share the customer feedback and also identify the best store practices. Questions 1. What were the difficulties faced by the stores? 2. How did the usage of the BI tool help in overcoming the difficulty?
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15.11 Glossary
Term Unicode Description It is a set of standard coding schemes planned to replace the multiple coding schemes currently used, worldwide. It is an international character set that was built to represent all the characters using a 2-byte (16-bit) format. It is an intentional or unintentional repetition of the computer data. The Data files has to be compressed by removing the redundancy and expressing the same data more concisely, whereas the reliability of the data transmission can be increased by sending the same data twice At many organisations it simply means a measure of the quality that strives for near perfection. It is a disciplined, data-driven approach and methodology for removing defects driving.

Redundancy

Six Sigma

References 1. Business Intelligence Competency Centers by Gloria J. Miller. 2. Business Intelligence Implementation: Issues and Perspectives (Paperback) by B. Sujatha. 3. Business Intelligence By Elizabeth Vitt, Michael Luckevich, Stacia Misner. 4. Design and Implementation of Data Mining Tools Page 239.

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