How Business Intelligence is linked to Data Warehousing

BI applications use data gathered from a data warehouse or a data mart. But every data warehouses are not used for business intelligence applications and vice versa.

Business Intelligence(BI) is a set of methodologies, processes, architectures, and technologies that transform raw data into meaningful and useful information which can be used by enterprise users to enable more effective strategic, tactical, and operational insights and decision-making.Business intelligence also includes technologies such as data integration, data quality, data warehousing, master data management, text and content analytics etc.

BI technologies provide historical, current and predictive views of business operations. Common functions of business intelligence technologies are reporting, online analytical processing(OLAP),analytics, data mining, process mining, complex event processing, business performance management, benchmarking, text mining, predictive analytics and prescriptive analytics.

Business intelligence aim is to support better business decision-making. Therefore a BI system can be called as a decision support system (DSS).Business intelligence is sometimes used in a competitive way because they support decision making, The reason why BI is called as competitive because BI uses technologies, processes, and applications to analyze mostly internal, structured data and business processes and at the same time gathers, analyzes and disseminates information with a topical focus on company competitors. Therefore BI can also be called as competitive intelligence. A data warehousing/datamart system is the backend, component for achieving business intelligence.

This section below includes different types of Business Intelligence tools.

Business Intelligence(BI) tools: Tools commonly used for Business Intelligence(BI).