The Essentials of Business Intelligence & Warehousing

The Essentials of Business Intelligence & Warehousing

Speaker: Rick van der Lans

The world of business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing uses a unique terminology and deploys its own set of technologies, design techniques, and products. For newcomers all this can be overwhelming. What do all these new terms exactly mean, such as star schema, data mart, ETL, self-service BI, data science, big data, staging area, and BI in the cloud? In this new course, which has been designed specifically for newcomers to BI and Data Warehousing, all the typical BI terms, concepts, techniques, architectures and technologies are explained. It is a complete and critical introduction.

The well-known data warehouse architectures of Bill Inmon and Ralph Kimball are explained in detail, including all the database components that they are made up of: staging area, operational data store, enterprise data warehouse and data mart. Their respective use cases, benefits, and drawbacks are discussed. Additionally, new upcoming architectures are clarified, such as datawarehouse in the cloud and the logical data warehouse architecture.

For designing all these databases special techniques exist, such as star schemas, snowflake schemas, and datavault. Here, a specific terminology is used as well, such as fact table, dimensional table, hierarchy, hub table, and slowly-changing dimensions. Working with ETL products will be discussed in relationship to topics such as data quality, data profiling and master data management.

The wide range of available technologies for data storage with their pros and cons are systematically discussed; from the traditional SQL databases to the new Hadoop technology, from analytical SQL database servers to SQL-on-Hadoop, and from on-premise data storage to storage in the cloud. And with all this new technology, what’s the role of good old SQL?

For reporting and delivering data to business users a wide range of products is available, from simple reporting tools to the most advanced data science tools. Products from IBM, Information Builders, Microsoft, Oracle, Qlik, SAP, SAS, Tableau, and many others are discussed and compared. The impact of new technologies for analytics, such as Spark and Hadoop, are explained. The capabilities for analyzing unstructured data, such as text, audio and video are discussed, together with the new world of streaming analytics.

At the end of this course, you will have a thorough understanding of the world of business intelligence and data warehousing.  You will learn about the techniques, the technologies  and the numerous products that are being applied. It is a complete and practical introduction to business intelligence and data warehousing and will help you on your way in BI projects.

https://irmuk.co.uk/events/the-essentials-of-business-intelligence-and-data-warehousing/