Business Intelligence

What is Business Intelligence?

Business intelligence is a broad set of applications, technologies and knowledge for gathering and analyzing data for the purpose of helping users make better business decisions.
The main challenge of Business Intelligence is to gather and serve organized information regarding all relevant factors that drive the business and enable end-users to access that knowledge easily and efficiently and in effect maximize the success of an organization.

Business intelligence produces analysis and provides in depth knowledge about performance indicators such as company's customers, competitors, business counterparts, economic environment and internal operations to help making effective and good quality business decisions.

From a technical standpoint, the most important areas that Business Intelligence (BI) covers are:

DW - Data warehousing - architecture, modeling, managing, processing

ETL process and data integration

Reporting, Information visualization and Dashboards

OLAP - Online Analytical Processing and multidimensional analysis

Data cleansing and data quality management

Performance management

Data mining, statistical analysis, forecasting

MIS - Management Information Systems

CRM - Customer Relationship Management

ETL Tools Info portal

ETL Tools portal provides information about different business intelligence tools and data warehousing solutions, with a main focus on ETL process and tools. On our pages you will find both general articles with high-level information on various Business Intelligence applications and architectures, as well as technical documents, with a low-level description of the presented solutions and detailed tutorials.
A great attention is paid to the Datastage and Informatica Powercenter ETL tools with a number of examples, tutorials, best practices and resolved problems with real-life scenarios.
There is also a wide range of information on a rapidly growing Open Source Business Intelligence market (OSBI), with emphasis on applications from the Pentaho BI family, including a Pentaho tutorial.