SQL BI in a nutshell

knownhero

Hi,

I'm just wondering if I have the whole idea of BI wrong or not, so thought I would come here and ask seeing as the chances of someone actually doing the job here is higher than in my office

I've got in my head that BI is analysis of the Databases for performance, expansion, clean up, monitoring and security, reporting and Implementing Data. I've probably got this completely wrong but any clarification would be great

Claymoore

You have the SQL part right, as those are required duties of a SQL admin. Business Intelligence is taking the massive amounts of data a company gathers/generates and putting it to use to improve the business. The data is better if it is in a structured format, like SQL, than unstructured, like a file share full of Excel spreadsheets.

Let's take a simple example of targeted advertising. The advertising company collects data on the click-through rate so they can bill the client. Nothing special about the data, just something gathered in the normal course of everyday business. BI will then take that data, see which ads you click on the most, and offer you ads based on your history. You are more likely to click on those ads, and thus generate more billable clicks for the advertising agency.

RobertKaucher

Here is a nice video that has a discussion of the term.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhZX0MAYKp8

RobertKaucher

A recent RunAsRadio also had a discussion of the MS BI stack in the enterprise. You'll probably get more out of this discussion as it goes into more detail regarding the MS tools and how they relate to the BI process.

RunAs Radio

chmod

An example, where i used to work 1 of our customers started a campaign of referrals on their website and a discout program with a card on some specific places.

After "analyzing" the information we determined that men over 40, tend to hangout @night, to drink beer with the special discount and then after filling out a satisfaction survey they used referred them to a friend.
People had this tendency(most of them) they developed a marketing plan for men over 40, built a bar in one of the villas and created a special tour for hanging out @nights to clubs that were linked to them and this increased profits by 35%.

That is the purpose of big data/data mining/ BI