The Microsoft® Data Warehouse Toolkit: With SQL Server™ 2005 and the Microsoft® Business Intelligence Toolset

8.1. Business Intelligence Basic Concepts

In the broadest sense, business intelligence has come to mean using information to make better business decisions. Many definitions list a term from the 1970s, decision support system (DSS), as a synonym. We've always liked this term because it is practical and descriptive of what we're trying to build. The term "business intelligence" began to rise in popularity at the end of the 1990s. It primarily referred to the structured data access layer between the users and the data warehouse—what we call the BI applications. However, at that time, the industry analysts were describing business intelligence as separate from the data warehouse, like you might build one without the other.

Although it is conceptually possible to build business intelligence applications without the benefit of a data warehouse, this rarely happens. A well-built data warehouse adds such incredible value to the data through the business dimensional model and the ETL process that it makes no sense to replicate this effort in order to build a stand-alone BI application. Most business intelligence applications are an integral part of the user-facing end of the data warehouse. In fact, we would never think of building a data warehouse without business intelligence applications—that's why one of the three tracks in the middle of the Life-cycle diagram in Figure 8.1 is dedicated to BI applications. That's also why we use the words "data warehousing" and "business intelligence" ...