Countless organizations have created mature dimensional data warehouses that are considered tremendous successes within their organizations. These data warehouse environments support key reporting and analysis requirements for the enterprise. Many are capable of supporting self-serve data access and analysis capabilities for disparate business users. Nonetheless, regardless of the success achieved by these dimensional data warehouses, […]

Predictive analytics is the name for a broad range of analysis techniques used for making predictions about future behavior. Credit scoring, risk analysis, and promotion selection are among the many applications that have proven to drive revenue and profit. It is worth taking a look at the “predictive analytics” section of Wikipedia to appreciate the […]

The increasingly popular data visualization tools deliver an environment that business analysts love. They provide the ability to define calculations, and more importantly, to explore and experiment with the data. The products have finally innovated away from the old standbys of tables, bar charts, and pie charts, making it easier for users to draw visual […]

One of the key components of the business intelligence (BI) architecture is a semantic layer. The semantic layer provides a translation of the underlying database structures into business user oriented terms and constructs. It is usually part and parcel of the query and reporting tool. OLAP or cube databases also include a BI semantic layer. […]

Drilling across separate business processes is one of the most powerful applications in a data warehouse. We often describe drilling across as magic: separately open connections to the dimensional models for each business process, fetch answer sets from each process labeled identically with row headers drawn from specially conformed dimensions, then deliver the result by […]