COMP255

Chapter 13
Business Intelligence and
Data Warehouses

1
 Learning Objectives
●
Describe the role of business intelligence in providing
comprehensive business decision support
●
Describe the architecture, reporting styles, evolution, and
benefits of business intelligence
●
Differentiate between operational data and decision support
data
●
Identify the purpose, characteristics, and components of a
data warehouse

2
 Learning Objectives
●
Develop star and snowflake schemas for decision-making purposes
●
Describe the characteristics and capabilities of online analytical
processing (OLAP)
●
Describe the role and functions of data analytics and data mining
●
Explain how SQL analytic functions are used to support data
analytics
●
Define data visualization and explain how it supports business
intelligence

3
 The Need for Data Analysis
●
Organizations tend to grow and prosper as they gain a better understanding
of their environment
– Evaluate through tracking daily transactions and analyzing company data
●
Organizations are always looking for a competitive advantage
– Product development, market positioning, sales promotions, and customer service
●
Companies and software vendors addressed these multilevel decision
support needs by creating autonomous applications for particular groups of
users
– This more comprehensive and integrated decision support framework within
organizations became known as business intelligence

4
 Business Intelligence
●
Is a comprehensive, cohesive, integrated set of
tools and processes that ...
– Captures, collects, integrates, stores, and analyzes
data
– Generates and presents information to support
business decision making

5
 Business Intelligence
●
Includes concepts, practices, tools and
techniques to help business
– Understand core capabilities
– Provide snapshots of the company situation
– Identify key opportunities to create a competitive
advantage

6
 Business Intelligence
●
Provides a framework for
– Collecting and storing operational data and aggregating it into
decision support data
– Analyzing decision support data and presenting generated
information to end users to support business decisions
– Making business decisions which generate more data
– Monitoring results to evaluate outcomes and predicting future
outcomes with a high degree of accuracy

7
Framework for BI

8
Benefits
of BI

9
Tools
of BI

10
Evolution of BI

11
 Operational vs. Decision Support
●
Operational data and decision support data
serve different purposes
– Operational data is useful for capturing daily
business transactions
– Decision support data gives tactical and strategic
business meaning to the operational data

12
 Operational vs. Decision Support
●
Decision support data differs from operational data in three main
areas
●
Time span
– Operational covers a much smaller time frame
●
Granularity
– Decision support data needs to support many levels of aggregation
●
Dimensionality
– Decision support data focuses on transcations

13
Operational vs. Decision Support

14
 Data Warehouse
●
Collect of data providing support of decision
making

15
Operational DB vs. Data Warehouse

16
Loading the Data Warehouse

17
 Data Marts
●
Small, single-subject data warehouse subset
– Provides decision support to a small group of people
●
Benefits over data warehouses
– Lower cost and shorter implementation time
– Technologically advanced
– Overcome people’s resistance to change

18
 Star Schema
●
Data-modeling technique
●
Maps multidimensional decision support data into a
relational database
●
Creates the near equivalent of multidimensional
database schema from existing relational database
●
Yields an easily implemented model for
multidimensional data analysis

19
 Star Schema Components
●
Facts: numeric values that represent a specific business aspect
●
Dimensions: qualifying characteristics that provide additional
perspectives to a given fact
●
Attributes: used to search, filter, and classify facts
●
Slice and dice: ability to focus on slices of the data cube for more
detailed analysis
●
Attribute hierarchies: provide a top-down data organization
– Aggregation and drill-down/roll-up data analysis

20
 Star Schema Representation
●
Facts and dimensions represented by physical
tables in data warehouse database
●
Many-to-one (M:1) relationship between fact
table and each dimension table

21
 Fact and Dimension Tables
●
Related by foreign keys
●
Subject to primary and foreign key constraints
●
Primary key of a fact table
●
Composite primary key because the fact table is related
to many dimension tables
●
Always formed by combining the foreign keys pointing to
the related dimension tables

22
Star Schema

23
 OLAP
●
Online Analytical Processing
●
Definition: Decision support system (DSS) tools that
use multidimensional data analysis techniques.
OLAP creates an advanced data analysis
environment that supports decision making,
business modeling, and operations research.
●
Simple example: Pivot Tables in Excel

24
 OLAP Features
●
Multidimensional Data Analysis Techniques
– Example: pivot tables
●
Advanced database support
– Not just relational databases, use many other sources
●
Easy to use end-user interface
– Not just for data nerds

25
 Data Analytics
●
Subset of business intelligence (BI) functionality
that encompasses a wide range of
mathematical, statistical, and modeling
techniques with the purpose of extracting
knowledge from data

26
 Three Parts
●
Explanatory analtyics
– Focuses on discovering and explaining data characteristics and
relationships based on existing data
●
Predictive analytics
– Focuses on predicting future data outcomes with a high degree of accuracy
●
Prescriptive analytics
– Factors information about possible situations or scenarios, available
resources, past performance, and current performance, and suggests a
course of action or strategy

27
 Data Mining
●
A process that employs automated tools to
analyze data in a data warehouse and other
sources and to proactively identify possible
relationships and anomalies

28
Data Mining

29
 Data Mining Results
●
Sixty-five percent of customers who did not use a particular
credit card in the last six months are 88 percent likely to
cancel that account.
●
Eighty-two percent of customers who bought a 42-inch or
larger LCD TV are 90 percent likely to buy an entertainment
center within the next four weeks.
●
If age < 30, income <= 25,000, credit rating < 3, and credit
amount > 25,000, then the minimum loan term is 10 years.

30
 Data Visualization
●
The process of abstracting data to provide a visual
representation of the data that enhances the user’s
ability to effectively comprehend the meaning of the
data
●
Goal is to make data/information easier to understand
●
Tools include things from spreadsheets to
Geographical Information Systems (GIS)

31
32
33
34
35