The Microsoft BI Stack: What’s It All About?
The point of BI is to move beyond the tactical and operational aspects of databases, which involve the fast collection, updating, and retrieval of data. BI aims to take the “raw material” that is the data collected from such activities and refine it into the “finished goods” of information about the data: summaries, trends, patterns, visualizations, and even predictions. These artifacts can help drive business decisions, and in fact, BI used to be called “Decision Support.”
Doing this kind of work requires making sure the data is clean and consistent; transforming its schema to be more optimized for querying; having tools that visualize summarized views of the data; and using specialized database engines ...
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