4 DB2 Cube Views: A Primer
1.1 Business Intelligence and OLAP introduction
The ability to collect, organize, and effectively exploit the mass of data that is
available to an organization has long been a goal of those that deploy information
systems. Over the years technologies have evolved from simple reporting
systems through to fully integrated Business Intelligence systems, as
organizations have strived to make effective use of their business information.
During the course of this evolution we have seen the development of
sophisticated tools to Extract data from source systems, Transform data, and
Load data into target systems — known as ETL tools. The front-end tools that are
used to query the data have likewise evolved to handle the diff ...