Making the most of data through Business Intelligence
Allan Mitchell & Chris Webb
Overview
Companies today are drowning under a sea of data, but very rarely have the
tools that would allow them to do anything useful with it. In this one day
seminar, suitable for DBAs, business analysts and developers, Allan Mitchell and
Chris Webb will give you an insight into what's possible with Business
Intelligence tools that Microsoft offers. They have implemented BI solutions for
companies large and small throughout the world. Let them show you the power of
your data!
This day long seminar is part of the SQLBits Cubed Training Day program, held on Friday 12th September before the SQLBits conference on the Saturday.
Abstract
Over the course of the day Allan and Chris will run through the process of
building a complete Business Intelligence solution using all the tools in the
Microsoft SQL Server suite. We'll start off by taking raw transactional data and
show you how to clean, transform and remodel it, and then load it into reporting
and analysis tools that will let your end users gain the maximum business
benefit from it. The breakdown of the day will be as follows:
What is BI?
Business Intelligence, or BI for short, is a term bandied around a lot today
but what does it actually mean? We'll discuss some possible definitions and the
kind of Business Intelligence solutions that companies are really building and
using today.
Dimensional Modeling
The technique of dimensional modeling is meant to solve the problems that
you encounter when trying to perform reporting directly from an OLTP database.
In this part of the day we will look at:
- What issues dimensional modelling is
trying to solve
- The theory of dimensional modeling
- What structures you see
in a dimensional model
ETL with Integration Services
ETL stands for 'Extract, Transform and Load', and it refers to the process of
extracting data from your transactional systems, cleaning it, validating it,
integrating it and then loading it into your dimensional model. It's probably
the most important and the most lengthy part of a project because invariably the
data you want to work with has a lot of problems, but if you give junk data to
your end users they will not be able to do anything useful with it. In this
section we'll take a look at how you can use Integration Services to:
- Extract data from many different sources,
- Clean, transform and conform it,
- Use its advanced functionality to uncover useful information that you might
not have known was there, and
- Load it into your dimensional model
Advanced Analysis and Querying with Analysis Services
If you and your users need to be able to query your data easily, perform
advanced analysis and calculations and get super-quick performance then you may
want to consider using Analysis Services. In this section we'll discuss:
- What Analysis Services is and what advantages it has over a relational
database for BI
- How to build cubes
- How the MDX query language allows you to create queries and calculations
that would be very difficult in SQL
Reporting with Reporting Services
While some users will want the powerful ad hoc querying that Analysis
Services offers, most will just be happy with straightforward reports. Reporting
Services allows you to create pixel-perfect reports from a variety of data
sources and render them in a number of formats such as over the web, pdf and
Excel. In this section we'll show:
- How to build reports using Reporting Services
- How to report from a relational data source
- How to report from an Analysis Services cube
Data Mining
All kinds of patterns and trends are hidden in your data that you may not
know about, and they can be found using the data mining functionality in
Analysis Services. In the final part of the day we'll show you how to:
- How to
build data mining models that will allow you discover patterns in and make
predictions from your data
- Let your end users do this within Excel 2007
Course Length & Type
One day instructor led seminar.
Location
12th September 2008 de Havilland, Hatfield
de Havilland Conference, Hatfield Hertfordshire. Directions map PDF, and Vistor Information leaflet.
Timetable