Has your company got lots of data that it could be using to help make
business decisions? Have you heard about business intelligence software,
but don’t know what it is? Then this seminar is for you. Allan Mitchell
and Chris Webb, two experts on the Microsoft Business Intelligence
stack, will explain what ‘business intelligence’ is and how you can go
about building a solution using the tools you get free with Microsoft
SQL Server 2005 including Integration Services, Analysis Services and
Reporting Services. Starting from an explanation of the jargon and the
theory behind it all, moving on to how to how you can collect data from
multiple different sources and create a data warehouse and finishing up
with the many options you’ve got for reporting from that data, you’ll
get a complete understanding of what’s possible and what other companies
are doing today. Suitable for DBAs, developers and business analysts,
this is a 200-level session with some technical detail.
This 1 day seminar will cover the following topics:
What is BI?
Business Intelligence, or BI for short, is a term bandied around a lot
today but what does it actually mean? We'll discuss some possible
definitions and the kind of Business Intelligence solutions that
companies are really building and using today.
Dimensional Modelling
The technique of dimensional modelling is meant to solve the problems
that you encounter when trying to perform reporting directly from an
OLTP database. In this part of the day we will look at:
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What issues dimensional modelling is trying to solve
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The theory of dimensional modelling
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What structures you see in a dimensional model
ETL with Integration Services
ETL stands for 'Extract, Transform and Load', and it refers to the
process of extracting data from your transactional systems, cleaning it,
validating it, integrating it and then loading it into your dimensional
model. It's probably the most important and the most lengthy part of a
project because invariably the data you want to work with has a lot of
problems, but if you give junk data to your end users they will not be
able to do anything useful with it. In this section we'll take a look at
how you can use Integration Services to:
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Extract data from many different sources,
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Clean, transform and conform it,
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Use its advanced functionality to uncover useful information that you might not have known was there,
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Load it into your dimensional model
Advanced Analysis and
Querying with Analysis Services
If you and your users need to be able to query your data easily, perform
advanced analysis and calculations and get super-quick performance then
you may want to consider using Analysis Services. In this section we'll
discuss:
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What Analysis Services is and what advantages it has over a relational database for BI
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How to build cubes
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How the MDX query language allows you to create queries and calculations that would be very difficult in SQL
Reporting with Reporting
Services
While some users will want the powerful ad hoc querying that Analysis
Services offers, most will just be happy with straightforward reports.
Reporting Services allows you to create pixel-perfect reports from a
variety of data sources and render them in a number of formats such as
over the web, pdf and Excel. In this section we'll show:
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How to build reports using Reporting Services
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How to report from a relational data source
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How to report from an Analysis Services cube
Data Mining
All kinds of patterns and trends are hidden in your data that you may
not know about, and they can be found using the data mining
functionality in Analysis Services. In the final part of the day we'll
show you how to:
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How to build data mining models that will allow you discover patterns in and make predictions from your data
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Let your end users do this within Excel 2007
Agenda
08.45 : Registration
09.15 : Seminar
11:00 : Break
11:15 : Seminar
13:00 : Light Lunch
13:30 : Seminar
14:45 : Break
15:00 : Seminar
16:45 : Q & A
17:00 : Finish
