Applied Microsoft Business Intelligence

Introduction

Business intelligence, including reporting and analytics, is essential to an organization's survival and growth. Understanding your data and turning it into actionable insights is the key to sustaining and growing your business. As companies recognize this need, the employees that facilitate these insights, also known as “data scientists,” are highly sought after across the board.

Microsoft's business intelligence suite contains tools that help the data scientists and developers perform their duties quickly and efficiently. Understanding which tool to use and how to use it in the best manner is required to provide the data. This book discusses each of the business intelligence tools and best practices associated with the Microsoft business intelligence stack, including reporting and analysis.

Overview of the Book and Technology

Microsoft's business intelligence landscape is changing at a faster rate than ever before. Several new methodologies have been incorporated into the stack, including self-service, big data, and the cloud. With the advent of these new methodologies affecting business intelligence, the number of tools is increasing. With all these changes, we recognized a need to have one place that describes each of these business intelligence tools and how they fit into a business intelligence solution.

The book also takes you outside the boundary of just the tools. You learn about different data and business intelligence architectures and when to use each ...