Warehousing Your Data in the Cloud with ETL

DWH on the CloudThe process of taking data from different systems and putting it into a data warehouse for business analysis can be a complicated affair. In this article, we look at what is involved and how the cloud has made matters potentially trickier.

A data warehouse is a relational database that is designed for query and analysis rather than for transaction processing. It usually contains historical data derived from transaction data, but it can include data from other sources..

BI USABILITY: evolution and tendencies

Introduction

What is known today by the name Business Intelligence (BI) has an origin and evolution that should be looked at in order to introduce the concept that will be the subject of this article: “BI Usability”.

One of the principal goals of BI is that users find the information they need to make decisions in due time and proper form. The form includes, among other things, the format in which the information is presented and the level of interaction expected to obtain the desired result. The previous points make up the term “BI Usability”.

 

Usability can be defined as software’s ease of use, in which factors such as the familiarity of the design, comfort, attractiveness, level of interaction permitted, response time, etc. also come into play.

Various definitions of usability have been selected to complement the concept: (*1):

Results of the last Forrester Wave about Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms

In his blog Boris Evelson explains the more relevant results of the las Forrester Wave about Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms.

These are the last movements, extracted from it:

  1. IBM Cognos, SAP BusinessObjects, Oracle, and SAS continue to lead the pack.
  2. Information Builders, Microsoft, and MicroStrategy move into the Leaders category.
  3. TIBCO Spotfire and Actuate maintain their Strong Performer status.
  4. QlikTech and Panorama Software move into the Strong Performer category.