Successful Business Intelligence, Second Edition, 2nd Edition

Chapter 2Technobabble: Components of a Business Intelligence Architecture

Every BI deployment has an underlying architecture. The BI architecture is much like the engine of a car—a necessary component, often powerful, but one that users, like drivers, don’t always want to or need to understand. For some companies new to BI, the BI architecture may primarily be the operational systems and the BI front-end tools. For more mature BI deployments, and particularly for enterprise customers, it will involve ETL (extract, transform, and load) tools, a data warehouse, data marts, BI front-end tools, and other such components. This environment may include multiple databases and platforms for different levels of detailed data, cleansed data, and analytic ...