Data Lakes

Glossary

This glossary gathers definitions of terms used in this book. These definitions are borrowed from the bibliographical sources and from the corporate terminology in use at IBM.

Business Intelligence

Business intelligence (BI) refers to the strategies and technologies used by organizations for data analysis of business information. Historically, it was synonymous with data warehousing; however, today, it more often refers to the analysis and reporting of data once it has been curated in a data warehouse or other data analytical platform. Similarly, BI tools refer to the software primarily used and business functions for reporting, visualization, creating dashboards and data analysis. These tools are typically used against data that has already been prepared for reporting and analysis (data marts); in contrast, data science involves a measure of data manipulation and, in some cases, acquiring data before analysis. In addition to statistical data analysis, data science may also involve aspects of machine learning.

Data Architecture

Data architecture plays an increasingly important role and has evolved to consider all areas of data management, not just relational database storage. It defines an organization’s data strategy, covering decisions on the different types of data store (relation, NoSQL), data integration strategies (messaging, streaming, API, batch files) and data security. Data architecture also encompasses the design of data stores (data modeling) and defines ...