Microsoft SQL 2005 came up with lot of features supporting requirements of business intelligence and data warehousing technologies. Brief note on some of the components of Microsoft BI suite.

What is Business Intelligence?

Business intelligence is a method of storing and presenting key enterprise data so that anyone in your company can quickly and easily ask questions of accurate and timely data. Effective BI allows end users to use data to understand why your business go the particular results that it did, to decide on courses of action based on past data, and to accurately forecast future results.

What is Data Warehouse?

A data warehouse is a type of computer database that is responsible for collecting and storing the information of a particular organization. The goal of using a data warehouse is to have an efficient way of managing information and analyzing data. (more details here). SQL 2005 database is proving to be one of the better database products for small and medium scale companies due to its user friendliness and less cost. There are plenty of organizations which are moving to MS SQL 2005 database for implementing their data warehouses.

What is Data Mart?

A defined subset of a data warehouse, often a single cube from a group. It represents one business unit.

For example a data warehouse of ABC company could consist data related to finance, sales, HR, purchase etc. One of their data mart contains only sales data.

What is Cube?

A storage structure used by classic data warehousing products in place of many. Cube usually present data that is aggregated, rather than each individual item. Cubes present a summarized, aggregated view of enterprise data, as opposed to normalized table sources that present detailed data. SSAS(SQL Server Analysis Services) is one of the most widely used multi dimensional database today. Compare to its earlier version(SQL 2000 MSOLAP), SSAS has rich array of features making it a serious contendor for top multi dimensional databse.

Decision Support System

The term’s broad definition can mean anything from a read-only copy of an online transaction processing (OLTP) database to a group of OLAP cubes or even a mixture of both. SSRS(SQL Server Reporting Services) provides best solution for low cost enterprise reporting. SSRS is a web based reporting tool which can be scaled very easily for large number of users.

ETL
ETL is abbreviation of Extraction, Transform, and Load. SSIS(SQL Server Integration Services) is the ETL product that comes alonng with SQL 2005. Compare to its prior version SQL 2000 DTS, SSIS looks like a new product alltogether. With its low pricing, SSIS is now becoming one of the most adopted ETL tools in the industry.

OLAP
OLAP is abbreviation of online analytical processing.

OLTP
OLTP is abbreviation of online transactional processing.