Business Intelligence for Beginners

This topic is an interesting one because it covers two related topic of discussion being Business Intelligence and the other being Data Warehouse for beginners. Both topics cannot be talked about without making reference to the other. On this post we shall learn why businesses or organizations need business intelligence and on the other hand we shall see why data warehousing is important to the study of business analysis. 

 

What is Business Intelligence?

A lot of blogs and authors have come up with different meaning of what business intelligence means. However, in this post about Business intelligence for beginners, I will juxtapose that business intelligence converts raw data into useful information which organizations use to make business decisions that work for the positive growth and development of the organization. What drives business intelligence for organizations is the use of large databases stored in various applications that can be accesses from a  warehouse. Hence, this shows the relationship between Data Warehouse and Business Intelligence (BI).

What is Data Warehousing?

Data Warehouse as earlier stated in this post organizes the various databases in one single application. Without data warehouse there will be no need for visualization of data. Data needs to be processed first before they can be used for visualization purpose. All data in a database sources can be stored in multiple places and accessed from a different location. Smaller companies will not need to have a data warehouse because of the size of data that they generate from customers, whereas, housing data in a database such as Oracle, SAP and so on will need to be stored in a large size database for use. Note that Whenever a new database is loaded to the Data warehouse, the operational data is what keeps loading up but not processed for use. 

Pros of Data Warehouse

There are various reasons why organizations make use of Data Warehouse and below they are given: 

• Having a Data warehouse enables us to understand trends in daily business activities.
• Data Warehouse gives accurate and reliable information to organizations after being processed for use.
• Data Warehouse is designed to the requirements of organizations to suit their business needs.
• Every organization has a unique mode of gathering data which can be processed individually according to the various data gathered.

Data Warehouse has various properties that it must be characterised with in other for it to be considered as Data Warehouse.

Properties of Data Warehouse

• Subject - oriented: Data can be categorized and stored by business subject rather than application
  
  
• Integrated: Data can be gathered from various sources and used in a single place
  
  
• Time-variant: It can be a series of snap shots which represents a time period.
  
  
• Non-Volatile: Data stored in data warehouse cannot be updated or deleted.

Understanding this concepts as a beginner is what you need to gain insight to Business intelligence. This information is for those who are looking forward to have a career as a business intelligence expert or if you want to just have this idea for your own personal consumption. Leave a comment below.