Professional Microsoft® SQL Server® Analysis Services 2008 with MDX

1.5. Microsoft Business Intelligence Capabilities

Different types of organizations face different challenges. Whether you work in a large or a small company, business intelligence (BI) is critical to provide the business insight you need to help everyone in every department of your organization succeed. To help you address specific BI needs, you typically need to perform various operations or tasks on your data. Figure 1-8 provides you with a list of various tasks typically performed for business intelligence in an organization and how SQL Server 2008 helps in various parts of business intelligence. You can have a single tool helping you with multiple BI tasks or multiple tools being used for each BI task. Your organization may only be utilizing some tasks for your BI needs. Now let's look at each operation in detail and how Microsoft SQL Server 2008 products help you in performing these operations.

Figure 1.8. Figure 1-8

1.5.1. Integrating Data

Typically, organizations have data available from different backend systems. In order to build a data warehouse, you typically integrate all the data into a staging database. SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) helps you in integrating data from backend systems to a single system. SSIS helps you in extracting data, cleaning the data, and then loading it to a single system. If you have multiple SQL Server relational databases, you ...