How To Make Quick Decisions With Microsoft Business Intelligence?

Business Intelligence tools are typically designed to extract, sort, analyze, transform and report data for business intelligence. These are a type of application software. Usually these tools get the data from a data warehouse or a data mart.

Business intelligence deploys techniques to transform huge amounts of raw data into usable and meaningful information with which the enterprises may make quick planning and efficient decision making. Microsoft Business Intelligence is capable of handling huge amounts of raw and unstructured data and to transform it into meaningful information to offer new strategic business opportunities.

Microsoft provides number of tools to handle the business data which can be used with Visual Studio interface.

Database Management Systems 
A database or DB is an organized collection of data. The data may be organized in required way in order to support the processes which require this information.

Database Management Systems or DBMS are application software which interacts with the users or system or database or other third party applications in order to retrieve, sort and analyze the business data. DBMS systems are designed to allow creation, definition, querying, updating and administering the DBs.

ETL Tools (Extracts, Transform, Load) 
ETL refers to a DB usage process in which it Extracts data from different data sources, Transforms the data to store it in required format for querying and analyzing purposes, Loads the data into the final target usually a DataMart or data ware house. ETL may take the data from homogeneous or heterogeneous systems maybe in different data formats like SQL, txt, xls etc. and stores the data in required format into the Data warehouse units.

Tools of MSBI (Microsoft Business Intelligence)

Three tools are offered by MSBI to perform ETL, Analysis and Reporting functionalities. They are SSIS, SSAS and SSRS.

1. SQL Server Integration Service (SSIS) 

SSIS is an ETL tool of MSBI. It is used to build high-performance workflow solutions and data integration. This also includes the operations for Data warehouse- extract, transform, Load.  The data can be retrieved from various locations or different formats, processed and saved into a centralized repository like a Data Mart or Data Warehouse. SSIS includes graphical tools to build or debug.

Data Warehouse or Data Mart

These are centralized repository of data which is mainly used for business analysis purposes or reporting. The repository stores integrated data from multiple sources in different formats. Data Warehouse stores historical and current data which can be retrieved to create reports, analyze the data and compare them. This helps the top management to get a quick glance about the business trend and to take quick decisions based on the prediction.

A DataMart usually consists of summarized information and it forms one of the part of Data Warehouse say finance, logistics, etc.  

2. SQL Server Analysis Service (SSAS)

This software suite converts two dimensional data into multi-dimensional data model i.e. OLTP. This facilitates the analysis of large volume of data. 
The main advantages of SSAS are:

• Key performance Indicator (KPI)


• Score card


• Slice, dice, drill down functionalities


• Good performance


• Multi-dimensional analysis


• Security

3. SQL Server Reporting Service (SSRS) 
Microsoft’s SSRS is an enterprise reporting platform. It supports traditional and interactive reports through the custom applications or over the web. It supports two dimensional and multi-dimensional data sources. 
Below mentioned are some of the features of SSRS:

• Web based access to reports


• Ad-hoc reporting support


• Retrieve data from various source


• Export functionality supporting lots of format.


• Display reports in various ways like tabular, chart, Gauge formats etc


• Report builder to customize the reports for end user.


• Easy subscriptions options

With the Microsoft’s BI and analytics tool, employees can make quick and informed decisions based on the data. The tools combine existing business data, external data from third party applications and also huge raw data.  The comprehensive BI- analytics tool provide end-to-end solutions to every user to handle the organization data.