CCW331

UNIT II

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

Business intelligence is an infrastructure that helps in the process of collecting,

storing, and analyzing data from business operations.

BI provides comprehensive business metrics, in near-real-time, to support better

decision making.

You can create performance benchmarks, spot market trends, increase compliance,
and improve almost every aspect of your business with better businessintelligence

Business Intelligence Business Analytics

Definition What happened and why it What will happen in the
happened (description future? (predictive
analytics) analytics)
Usage Uses past and current data Uses historical data to
to track present generate prediction for
performance and drive future strategic decisions
progress
Application Performance management, Statistical analysis, data
visual insights, flexible modeling, financial
reporting forecasting

Business Intelligence (BI) is a technology-driven process for analyzing data and

delivering actionable information that helps executives, managers and workers make
informed business decisions.

As part of the BI process, organizations collect data from internal IT systems and external
sources, prepare it for analysis, run queries against the data and create data
visualizations, BI dashboards and reports to make the analytics results available to
business users for operational decision-making and strategic planning

How BI works
 Businesses and organizations have questions and goals. To answer these questions
and track performance against these goals, it is essential to gather the necessary data,
analyze it, and determine which actions to take to reach their goals.
 On the technical side, raw data is collected from business systems. Data is processed
and then stored in data warehouses, the cloud, applications, and files.
 Once it’s stored, users can access the data, starting the analysis process to answer
business questions.
 BI platforms also offer data visualization tools, which convert data into charts or
graphs, as well as presenting to any key stakeholders or decision-makers.

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BI Processes
Business Intelligence has evolved to include more processes and activities to help
improve performance. These processes include:

 Data mining: Using databases, statistics, and machine learning (ML) to uncover
trends in large datasets
 Reporting: Sharing data analysis to stakeholders so they can draw conclusions and
make decisions
 Performance metrics and benchmarking: Comparing current performance data to
historical data to track performance against goals, typically using customized
dashboards
 Descriptive analytics: Using preliminary data analysis to find out what happened
 Querying: Asking the data-specific questions, BI pulling the answers from the data
sets
 Statistical analysis: Taking the results from descriptive analytics and further
exploring the data using statistics such as how this trend happened and why
 Data visualization: Turning data analysis into visual representations such as charts,
graphs, and histograms to more easily consume data
 Visual analysis: Exploring data through visual storytelling to communicate insights
on the fly and stay in the flow of analysis
 Data preparation: Compiling multiple data sources, identifying the dimensions and
measurements, and preparing it for data analysis

Steps involved in developing BI strategy

 Know your business strategy and goals.
 Identify key stakeholders.
 Choose a sponsor from your key stakeholders.
 Choose your BI platform and tools.
 Create a BI team.
 Define your scope.
 Prepare your data infrastructure.
 Define your goals and roadmap.

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Advantages and Limitations of BI

Benefits of BI
 Data-driven business decisions: The ability to drive business decisions with data
is the central benefit of BI. A strong BI strategy can deliver accurate data and reporting
capabilities faster to business users to help them make better business decisions in a
more timely fashion.
 Faster analysis and intuitive dashboards: BI improves reporting efficiency by
condensing reports into dashboards that are easy for non-technical users to analyze,
saving them time when seeking to glean insights from data.
 Increased organizational efficiency: BI can help provide holistic views of business
operations, giving leaders the ability to benchmark results against larger
organizational goals and identify areas of opportunity.
 Improved customer experience: Ready access to data can help employees charged
with customer satisfaction provide better experiences.
 Improved employee satisfaction: Providing business users access to data without
having to contact analysts or IT can reduce friction, increase productivity, and
facilitate faster results.
 Trusted and governed data: Modern BI platforms can combine internal databases
with external data sources into a single data warehouse, allowing departments across
an organization to access the same data at one time.
 Increased competitive advantage: A sound BI strategy can help businesses monitor
their changing market and anticipate customer needs.

Disadvantages of BI include:
 Complexity: The implementation and upkeep of business intelligence systems can be
extremely difficult and complicated. This may be a drawback for companies with
constrained IT resources.
 High costs: Some businesses find it prohibitively expensive to implement and
purchase business intelligence technologies.
 Business intelligence strongly depends on accurate and current data. The insights
produced by business intelligence technologies could not be accurate if the data is
inconsistent, erroneous, or incomplete.
 Data Security: Business intelligence systems handle and store a lot of sensitive data,
which, if not adequately protected, is susceptible to security breaches.
 Dependence on IT: Because business intelligence solutions frequently rely largely
on IT assistance, it may be challenging for enterprises to quickly get the data they
require.
 Limited scalability: For firms with huge data volumes, business intelligence
solutions may not be able to handle enormous amounts of data.

Types of Decisions Supported by Business Intelligence:

Strategic Level: The strategic level is the level where the Heads of the company decide
the strategies of any business.
Tactical Level: Once the strategy is made though for handling all the details and matters
have a tactical level where all the technologies and methodologies come under one
umbrella. This level is further responsible for continuously updating the data.

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Operational Level: Operation decisions are made at this level. Operational decisions
help in operating the system.

Applications of Business Intelligence:

 In Decision Making of the company by decision-makers of the organizations.
 In Data Mining while extracting knowledge.
 In Operational Analytics and operational management.
 In Predictive Analytics.
 In Prescriptive Analytics.
 Making Structured data from unstructured data.
 In Decision Support System.
 In Executive Information System (EIS).

Topic 10 - Data Warehouses and Data Mart

A data warehouse is a type of data management system that is designed to enable and
support business intelligence (BI) activities, especially analytics.
Data warehouses are solely intended to perform queries and analysis and often contain
large amounts of historical data

Typical data warehouse often includes the following elements:

• A relational database to store and manage data
• An extraction, loading, and transformation (ELT) solution for preparing the data for
analysis
• Statistical analysis, reporting, and data mining capabilities
• Client analysis tools for visualizing and presenting data to business users
• Other, more sophisticated analytical applications that generate actionable
information by applying data science and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, or
graph and spatial features that enable more kinds of analysis of data at scale
• Organizations can also select a solution combining transaction processing, real-time
analytics across data warehouses and data lakes, and machine learning in one MySQL
Database service—without the complexity, latency, cost, and risk of extract,
transform, and load (ETL) duplication.

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BI VS Data Warehouse

Business Intelligence Data Warehouse

It is a set of tools and methods to analyzeIt is a system for storage of data from
data and discover, extract and formulate various sources in an orderly manner as to
actionable information that would be facilitate business-minded reads and
useful for business decisions writes.
It is a Decision Support System (DSS). It is a data storage system
Serves at the front end. Serves at the back end.
The aim of business intelligence is to enable
A data warehouse’s main aim is to provide
users to make informed, data- driven the users of business intelligence; a
decisions. structured and comprehensive view of
available data of an organization.
Collects data from the data warehouse for Collects data from various disparate
analysis sources and organizes it for efficient BI
analysis
Comprises business reports, charts, graphs Comprises of data held in “face tables” and
etc. “dimensions” with business meaning
incorporated into them
Handled by executives and analysts Handled and maintained by data engineers
relatively higher up in the hierarchy and system administrators who report to/
work for the executives and analysts

A data mart is a smaller subsection of a data warehouse built specifically for a

particular subject area, business function, or group of users.
The main idea is to provide a specific part of an organization with data that is the most
relevant for their analytical needs.

Data Marts are analytical record stores designed to focus on particular business
functions for a specific community within an organization. Data marts are derived from
subsets of data in a data warehouse, though in the bottom-up data warehouse design

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methodology, the data warehouse is created from the union of organizational data marts.

The fundamental use of a data mart is Business Intelligence (BI) applications. BI is used
to gather, store, access, and analyze record. It can be used by smaller businesses to utilize
the data they have accumulated since it is less expensive than implementing a data
warehouse.

Reasons for creating a data mart

 Creates collective data by a group of users
 Easy access to frequently needed data
 Ease of creation
 Improves end-user response time
 Lower cost than implementing a complete data warehouses
 Potential clients are more clearly defined than in a comprehensive data warehouse
 It contains only essential business data and is less cluttered.

Types of Data Marts

There are mainly two approaches to designing data marts. These approaches are

 Dependent Data Marts

 Independent Data Marts

Dependent Data Marts

A dependent data marts is a logical subset of a physical subset of a higher data warehouse.
According to this technique, the data marts are treated as the subsets of a data warehouse.
In this technique, firstly a data warehouse is created from which further various data
marts can be created. These data mart are dependent on the data warehouse and extract
the essential record from it.

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In this technique, as the data warehouse creates the data mart; therefore, there is no
need for data mart integration. It is also known as a top-down approach.

Independent Data Marts

The second approach is Independent data marts (IDM) Here, firstly independent data
marts are created, and then a data warehouse is designed using these independent
multiple data marts.

In this approach, as all the data marts are designed independently; therefore, the
integration of data marts is required. It is also termed as a bottom-up approach as the
data marts are integrated to develop a data warehouse.

Steps in Implementing a Data Mart

The significant steps in implementing a data mart are to design the schema, construct the
physical storage, populate the data mart with data from source systems, access it to make
informed decisions and manage it over time. So, the steps are:

Designing
The design step is the first in the data mart process. This phase covers all of the functions
from initiating the request for a data mart through gathering data about the requirements
and developing the logical and physical design of the data mart.

It involves the following tasks:

 Gathering the business and technical requirements

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 Identifying data sources

 Selecting the appropriate subset of data
 Designing the logical and physical architecture of the data mart.
 Constructing
 This step contains creating the physical database and logical structures associated
with the data mart to provide fast and efficient access to the data.

It involves the following tasks:

 Creating the physical database and logical structures such as tablespaces associated
with the data mart.
 creating the schema objects such as tables and indexes describe in the design step.
 Determining how best to set up the tables and access structures.

Populating
This step includes all of the tasks related to the getting data from the source, cleaning it
up, modifying it to the right format and level of detail, and moving it into the data mart.

It involves the following tasks:

 Mapping data sources to target data sources

 Extracting data
 Cleansing and transforming the information.
 Loading data into the data mart
 Creating and storing metadata

Accessing
This step involves putting the data to use: querying the data, analyzing it, creating
reports, charts and graphs and publishing them.

It involves the following tasks:

 Set up and intermediate layer (Meta Layer) for the front-end tool to use. This layer
translates database operations and objects names into business conditions so that the
end-clients can interact with the data mart using words which relates to the business
functions.
 Set up and manage database architectures like summarized tables which help queries
agree through the front-end tools execute rapidly and efficiently.

Managing
This step contains managing the data mart over its lifetime. In this step,
management functions are performed as:
 Providing secure access to the data.
 Managing the growth of the data.
 Optimizing the system for better performance.
 Ensuring the availability of data event with system failures.

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Data Warehouse Data Mart

A Data Warehouse is a vast repository of A data mart is an only subtype of a Data

information collected from various Warehouses. It is architecture to meet the
organizations or departments within a requirement of a specific user group.
corporation.

It may hold multiple subject areas. It holds only one subject area. For example,
Finance or Sales.

It holds very detailed information. It may hold more summarized data.

Works to integrate all data sources It concentrates on integrating data from a

given subject area or set of source systems.

In data warehousing, Fact constellation is In Data Mart, Star Schema and Snowflake
used. Schema are used.

It is a Centralized System. It is a Decentralized

System.

Data Warehousing is the data-oriented. Data Marts is a project-oriented.

Data warehouse delivery process

Topic 11- Knowledge Management

Knowledge management (KM) is the process of identifying, organizing, storing and

disseminating information within an organization. A knowledge management system
(KMS) harnesses the collective knowledge of the organization, leading to better
operational efficiencies. These systems are supported by the use of a knowledge base.

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Effective knowledge management system typically goes through three main steps:

 Knowledge Creation: During this step, organizations identify and document any
existing or new knowledge that they want to circulate across the company.

 Knowledge Storage: During this stage, an information technology system is typically

used to host organizational knowledge for distribution. Information may need to be
formatted in a particular way to meet the requirements of that repository.

 Knowledge Sharing: In this final stage, processes to share knowledge are

communicated broadly across the organization. The rate in which information
spreads will vary depending on organizational culture. Companies that encourage and
reward this behavior will certainly have a competitive advantage over other ones in
their industry.

Three types of knowledge—tacit, implicit, and explicit knowledge. These types of

knowledge are largely distinguished by the codification of the information.

Tacit knowledge:
 This type of knowledge is typically acquired through experience, and it is
intuitively understood.
 As a result, it is challenging to articulate and codify, making it difficult to transfer
this information to other individuals.
 Examples of tacit knowledge can include language, facial recognition, or leadership
skills.

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Implicit knowledge:
 While some literature equivocates implicit knowledge to tacit knowledge, some
academics break out this type separately, expressing that the definition of tactic
knowledge is more nuanced.
 While tacit knowledge is difficult to codify, implicit knowledge does not necessarily
have this problem.
 Instead, implicit information has yet to be documented. It tends to exist within
processes, and it can be referred to as “know-how” knowledge.

Explicit knowledge:
 Explicit knowledge is captured within various document types such as manuals,
reports, and guides, allowing organizations to easily share knowledge across
teams.
 This type of knowledge is perhaps the most well-known and examples of it include
knowledge assets such as databases, white papers, and case studies.
 This form of knowledge is important to retain intellectual capital within an
organization as well as facilitate successful knowledge transfer to new employees.

KM Tools

There are a number tools that organizations utilize to reap the benefits of knowledge
management. Examples of knowledge management systems can include:

 Document management systems act as a centralized storage system for digital

documents, such as PDFs, images, and word processing files. These systems enhance
employee workflows by enabling easy retrieval of documents, such as lessons
learned.
 Content management systems (CMS) are applications which manage web content
where end users can edit and publish content. These are commonly confused with
document management systems, but CMSs can support other media types, such as
audio and video.
 Intranets are private networks that exist solely within an organization, which enable
the sharing of enablement, tools, and processes within internal stakeholders. While
they can be time-consuming and costly to maintain, they provide a number of
groupware services, such as internal directories and search, which facilitate
collaboration.

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 Wikis can be a popular knowledge management tool given its ease of use. They make
it easy to upload and edit information, but this ease can lead to concerns about
misinformation as workers may update them with incorrect or outdated information.
 Data warehouses aggregate data from different sources into a single, central,
consistent data store to support data analysis, data mining, artificial intelligence (AI),
and machine learning. Data is extracted from these repositories so that companies can
derive insights, empowering employees to make data-driven decisions.

KM benefits
 Identification of skill gaps: When teams create relevant documentation around
implicit or tacit knowledge or consolidate explicit knowledge, it can highlight gaps in
core competencies across teams. This provides valuable information to management
to form new organizational structures or hire additional resources.
 Make better informed decisions: Knowledge management systems armindividuals
and departments with knowledge. By improving accessibility to current and historical
enterprise knowledge, your teams can upskill and make more information-driven
decisions that support business goals.
 Maintains enterprise knowledge: If your most knowledgeable employees left
tomorrow, what would your business do? Practicing internal knowledge management
enables businesses to create an organizational memory. Knowledge held by your
long-term employees and other experts, then make it accessible to your wider team.
 Operational efficiencies: Knowledge management systems create a go-to place that
enable knowledge workers to find relevant information more quickly. This, in turn,
reduces the amount of time on research, leading to faster decision-making and cost-
savings through operational efficiencies. Increase productivity not only saves time,
but also reduces costs.
 Increased collaboration and communication: Knowledge management systems
and organizational cultures work together to build trust among team members.These
information systems provide more transparency among workers, creating more
understanding and alignment around common goals. Engaged leadership and open
communication create an environment for teams to embrace innovation and
feedback.
 Data Security: Knowledge management systems enable organizations to customize
permission control, viewership control and the level of document-security to ensure
that information is shared only in the correct channels or with selected individuals.
Give your employees the autonomy access knowledge safely and with confidence.

Topic 12 - Types of Decisions

Business intelligence supports the three types of decision-making mentioned above:
strategic, tactical, and operational. Its frequency and organizational impact characterize
each.
Strategic decisions
 Strategic decisions comprise the highest level of organizational business decisions
and are usually less frequent and made by the organization’s executives. Yet, their
impact is enormous and far-reaching.

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 Some types of strategic decisions include selecting a particular market to penetrate,

a company to acquire, or whether to hire additional staff.

 Decisions made at this level usually involve significant expenditure. However, they
are generally non-repetitive in nature and are taken only after careful analysis and
evaluation of many alternatives.

Tactical decisions
 Tactical decisions (or semistructured decisions) occur with greater frequency (e.g.,
weekly or monthly) and fall into the mid-management level. Often, they relateto the
implementation of strategic decisions.

 Examples of tactical decisions include product price changes, work schedules,

departmental reorganization, and similar activities.

 The impact of these types of decisions is medium regarding risk to the organization
and impact on profitability.

Operational decisions
 Operational decisions (or structured decisions) usually happen frequently (e.g.,
daily or hourly), relate to day-to-day op•erations of the enterprise, and have a lesser
impact on the organization. Operational decisions determine the day-to-day
profitability of the business, how effectively it retains customers, or how well it
manages risk.

 Answering a sales inquiry, approving a quotation, or calculating employee bonuses

may be examples of this decision type.

Summary

 Strategic: Long-term, complex, made by senior managers

 Tactical: Medium-term, less complex, made by mid-level managers
 Operational: Day-to-day, simple, routine, made by junior managers

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Unstructured decisions are those in which the decision maker must providejudgement,
evaluation, and insight to solve the problem.

Structured decisions, by contrast, are repetitive and routine, and they involve a definite
procedure for handling them so that they do not have to be treated each time as if they
were new.

Many decisions have elements of both types of decisions and are semistructured, where
only part of the problem has a clear-cut answer provided by an accepted procedure. In
general, structured decisions are most prevalent at lower organizational levels, whereas
unstructured problems are most common at higher levels of the firms.

Topic 13 - Decision Making Process

 Decision-making process is a series of steps taken by an individual to determine

the best option or course of action to meet their needs.
 In a business context, it is a set of steps taken by managers in an enterprise to
determine the planned path for business initiatives and to set specific actions in
motion.
 Ideally, business decisions are based on an analysis of objective facts, aided by the use
of business intelligence (BI) and analytics tools.
 In any business situation there are multiple directions in which to take a strategy or
an initiative.
 The variety of alternatives to weigh -- and the volume of decisions that must be made
on an ongoing basis, especially in large organizations -- makes the implementation of
an effective decision-making process a crucial element of managing successful
business operations.

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There are many different decision-making methodologies, but most share at least
five steps in common:

 Identify a business problem.

 Seek information about different possible decisions and their likely effect.
 Evaluate the alternatives and choose one of them.
 Implement the decision in business operations.
 Monitor the situation, gather data about the decision's impact and make changes if
necessary.

Topic 14- Decision Support Systems

 A decision support system (DSS) is a computer-based information system that

supports business or organizational decision-making activities; typically this results
in ranking, sorting, or choosing from among alternatives. DSSs serve the management,
operations, and planning levels of an organization (usually mid and higher
management) and help people make decisions about problems that may be rapidly
changing and not easily specified in advance.
 A decision support system (DSS) is an analytics software program used to gather and
analyze data to inform decision making.
 There are many different types of decision support systems, from modern business
intelligence which uses AI and machine learning to suggest insights and analyses for
humans to perform, to model-based DSS systems which use predefined criteria to
perform automated calculations and deliver best-case decisions.
 For all types, DSS is used in timely problem solving to improve efficiency and
streamline operations, planning and company management.

There are several types of DSSs that include:

 Communication-driven DSS which enables cooperation, supporting more than one

person working on a shared task; examples include integrated tools like Google Docs
or Microsoft Groove.

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 Document-driven DSS which manages, retrieves, and manipulates unstructured

information in a variety of electronic formats.
 Knowledge-driven DSS provides specialized problem-solving expertise stored as
facts, rules, procedures, or in similar structures
 Model-driven DSS emphasizes access to and manipulation of a statistical, financial,
optimization, or simulation model. Model-driven DSS use data and parameters
provided by users to assist decision makers in analyzing a situation; they are not
necessarily data-intensive.
 Data-driven DSS (or data-oriented DSS) emphasizes access to and manipulation of a
time series of internal company data and, sometimes, external data. A data-driven
DSS, which we will focus on, emphasizes access to and manipulation of a time series
of internal company data and sometimes external data. Simple file systems accessed
by query and retrieval tools provide the most elementary level of functionality. Data
warehouse systems that allow the manipulation of data by computerized tools
tailored to a specific task and setting or by more general tools and operators provide
additional functionality. Data-driven DSS with online analytical processing (OLAP)
provide the highest level of functionality.

Characteristics of DSS

 The primary purpose of using a DSS is to present information to the customer in

an easy-to-understand way. A DSS system is beneficial because it can be
programmed to generate many types of reports, all based on user specifications.
For example, the DSS can generate information and output its information
graphically, as in a bar chart that represents projected revenue or as a written
report.

 As technology continues to advance, data analysis is no longer limited to large,

bulky mainframe computers. Since a DSS is essentially an application, it can be
loaded on most computer systems, whether on desktops or laptops. Certain DSS
applications are also available through mobile devices.

 The flexibility of the DSS is extremely beneficial for users who travel frequently.
This gives them the opportunity to be well-informed at all times, providing them
the ability to make the best decisions for their company and customers on the go
or even on the spot.

DSS Uses
 In organizations, a decision support system (DSS) analyzes and synthesizes vast
amounts of data to assist in decision-making.
 With this information, it produces reports that may project revenue, sales, or manage
inventory.
 Through the integration of multiple variables, a DSS can produce a number of
different outcomes based on the company’s previous data and current inputs.
 Decision support systems help in making more informed decisions. Often used by
upper and mid-level management, decision support systems are used to make
actionable decisions, or produce multiple possible outcomes based on current and
historical company data.

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 At the same time, decision support systems can be used to produce reports for
customers that are easily digestible and can be adjusted based on user specifications.

Decision support systems are used in a broad array of industries. Example uses
include:

 GPS route planning. A DSS can be used to plan the fastest and best routes between
two points by analyzing the available options. These systems often include the
capability to monitor traffic in real-time to route around congestion.

 Crop planning. Farmers use DSS to help them determine the best time to plant,
fertilize, and reap their crops. Bayer Crop Science has applied analytics and decision-
support to every element of its business, including the creation of “virtual factories”
to perform “what-if” analyses at its corn manufacturing sites.

 Clinical DSS. These systems help clinicians diagnose their patients. Penn Medicine
has created a clinical DSS that helps it get ICU patients off ventilators faster.

 ERP dashboards. These systems help managers monitor performance indicators.

Digital marketing and services firm Clearlink uses a DSS system to help its managers
pinpoint which agents need extra help.

Topic 15- Business Intelligence

 DSS and business intelligence (BI) are often conflated. Some experts consider BI a
successor to DSS. Decision support systems are generally recognized as one element
of business intelligence systems, along with data warehousing and data mining.
 Whereas BI is a broad category of applications, services, and technologies for
gathering, storing, analyzing, and accessing data for decision-making,
 DSS applications tend to be more purpose-built for supporting specific decisions. For
example, a business
 DSS might help a company project its revenue over a set period by analyzing past
product sales data and current variables.
 Healthcare providers use clinical decision support systems to make the clinical
workflow more efficient: computerized alerts and reminders to care providers,
clinical guidelines, condition-specific order sets, and so on.

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Topic 16 – OLAP

OLAP stands for On-Line Analytical Processing. OLAP is a classification of software

technology which authorizes analysts, managers, and executives to gain insight into
information through fast, consistent, interactive access in a wide variety of possible views
of data that has been transformed from raw information to reflect the real dimensionality
of the enterprise as understood by the clients.

OLAP implement the multidimensional analysis of business information and support the
capability for complex estimations, trend analysis, and sophisticated data modeling. It is
rapidly enhancing the essential foundation for Intelligent Solutions containing Business
Performance Management, Planning, Budgeting, Forecasting, Financial Documenting,
Analysis, Simulation-Models, Knowledge Discovery, and Data Warehouses Reporting.
OLAP enables end-clients to perform ad hoc analysis of record in multiple dimensions,
providing the insight and understanding they require for better decision making.

OLAP applications are used by a variety of the functions of an organization.

Finance and accounting:

Budgeting
Activity-based costing
Financial performance analysis
And financial modeling
Sales and Marketing

Sales analysis and forecasting

Market research analysis
Promotion analysis
Customer analysis
Market and customer segmentation
Production

Production planning
Defect analysis
OLAP cubes have two main purposes. The first is to provide business users with a data
model more intuitive to them than a tabular model. This model is called a Dimensional
Model.

The second purpose is to enable fast query response that is usually difficult to achieve
using tabular models.

OLAP working
It pre-calculates most of the queries that are typically very hard to execute over tabular
databases, namely aggregation, joining, and grouping. These queries are calculated
during a process that is usually called 'building' or 'processing' of the OLAP cube. This
process happens overnight, and by the time end users get to work - data will have been
updated.

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OLAP Guidelines

1) Multidimensional Conceptual View: This is the central features of an OLAP system.

By needing a multidimensional view, it is possible to carry out methods like slice and dice.

2) Transparency: Make the technology, underlying information repository, computing

operations, and the dissimilar nature of source data totally transparent to users. Such
transparency helps to improve the efficiency and productivity of the users.

3) Accessibility: It provides access only to the data that is actually required to perform
the particular analysis, present a single, coherent, and consistent view to the clients. The
OLAP system must map its own logical schema to the heterogeneous physical data stores
and perform any necessary transformations. The OLAP operations should be sitting
between data sources (e.g., data warehouses) and an OLAP front-end.

4) Consistent Reporting Performance: To make sure that the users do not feel any
significant degradation in documenting performance as the number of dimensions or the
size of the database increases. That is, the performance of OLAP should not suffer as the
number of dimensions is increased. Users must observe consistent run time, response
time, or machine utilization every time a given query is run.

5) Client/Server Architecture: Make the server component of OLAP tools sufficiently

intelligent that the various clients to be attached with a minimum of effort and integration
programming. The server should be capable of mapping and consolidating data between
dissimilar databases.

6) Generic Dimensionality: An OLAP method should treat each dimension as

equivalent in both is structure and operational capabilities. Additional operational
capabilities may be allowed to selected dimensions, but such additional tasks should be
grantable to any dimension.

7) Dynamic Sparse Matrix Handling: To adapt the physical schema to the specific
analytical model being created and loaded that optimizes sparse matrix handling. When
encountering the sparse matrix, the system must be easy to dynamically assume the
distribution of the information and adjust the storage and access to obtain and maintain
a consistent level of performance.

8) Multiuser Support: OLAP tools must provide concurrent data access, data integrity,
and access security.

9) Unrestricted cross-dimensional Operations: It provides the ability for the

methods to identify dimensional order and necessarily functions roll-up and drill-down
methods within a dimension or across the dimension.

10) Intuitive Data Manipulation: Data Manipulation fundamental the consolidation

direction like as reorientation (pivoting), drill-down and roll-up, and another
manipulation to be accomplished naturally and precisely via point-and-click and drag

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and drop methods on the cells of the scientific model. It avoids the use of a menu or
multiple trips to a user interface.

11) Flexible Reporting: It implements efficiency to the business clients to organize

columns, rows, and cells in a manner that facilitates simple manipulation, analysis, and
synthesis of data.

12) Unlimited Dimensions and Aggregation Levels: The number of data dimensions
should be unlimited. Each of these common dimensions must allow a practically
unlimited number of customer-defined aggregation levels within any given consolidation
path.

Characteristics of OLAP

In the FASMI characteristics of OLAP methods, the term derived from the first letters of
the characteristics are:

Fast
It defines which the system targeted to deliver the most feedback to the client within
about five seconds, with the elementary analysis taking no more than one second and
very few taking more than 20 seconds.

Analysis
It defines which the method can cope with any business logic and statistical analysisthat
is relevant for the function and the user, keep it easy enough for the target client. Although
some preprogramming may be needed we do not think it acceptable if all application
definitions have to be allow the user to define new Adhoc calculations as part of the
analysis and to document on the data in any desired method, without having to program
so we excludes products (like Oracle Discoverer) that do not allow the user to define new
Adhoc calculation as part of the analysis and to document on the data in any desired
product that do not allow adequate end user-oriented calculation flexibility.

Share
It defines which the system tools all the security requirements for understanding and, if
multiple write connection is needed, concurrent update location at an appropriated level,
not all functions need customer to write data back, but for the increasing number which
does, the system should be able to manage multiple updates in a timely, secure manner.

Multidimensional
This is the basic requirement. OLAP system must provide a multidimensional conceptual
view of the data, including full support for hierarchies, as this is certainly the most logical
method to analyze business and organizations.

Information
The system should be able to hold all the data needed by the applications. Data sparsity
should be handled in an efficient manner.

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The main characteristics of OLAP are as follows:

 Multidimensional conceptual view: OLAP systems let business users have a

dimensional and logical view of the data in the data warehouse. It helps in carrying
slice and dice operations.
 Multi-User Support: Since the OLAP techniques are shared, the OLAP operation
should provide normal database operations, containing retrieval, update, adequacy
control, integrity, and security.
 Accessibility: OLAP acts as a mediator between data warehouses and front-end. The
OLAP operations should be sitting between data sources (e.g., data warehouses) and
an OLAP front-end.
 Storing OLAP results: OLAP results are kept separate from data sources.
 Uniform documenting performance: Increasing the number of dimensions or
database size should not significantly degrade the reporting performance of the OLAP
system.
 OLAP provides for distinguishing between zero values and missing values so that
aggregates are computed correctly.
 OLAP system should ignore all missing values and compute correct aggregate values.
 OLAP facilitate interactive query and complex analysis for the users.
 OLAP allows users to drill down for greater details or roll up for aggregations of
metrics along a single business dimension or across multiple dimension.
 OLAP provides the ability to perform intricate calculations and comparisons.
 OLAP presents results in a number of meaningful ways, including charts and graphs.

OLAP holds several benefits for businesses: -

 OLAP helps managers in decision-making through the multidimensional record

views that it is efficient in providing, thus increasing their productivity.
 OLAP functions are self-sufficient owing to the inherent flexibility support to the
organized databases.
 It facilitates simulation of business models and problems, through extensive
management of analysis-capabilities.
 In conjunction with data warehouse, OLAP can be used to support a reduction in the
application backlog, faster data retrieval, and reduction in query drag.

Motivations for using OLAP

1) Understanding and improving sales: For enterprises that have much products and
benefit a number of channels for selling the product, OLAP can help in finding the most
suitable products and the most famous channels. In some methods, it may be feasible to
find the most profitable users. For example, considering the telecommunication industry
and considering only one product, communication minutes, there is a high amount of
record if a company want to analyze the sales of products for every hour of the day (24
hours), difference between weekdays and weekends (2 values) and split regions to which
calls are made into 50 region.

2) Understanding and decreasing costs of doing business: Improving sales is one

method of improving a business, the other method is to analyze cost and to control them
as much as suitable without affecting sales. OLAP can assist in analyzing the costs

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related to sales. In some methods, it may also be feasible to identify expenditures which
produce a high return on investments (ROI). For example, recruiting a top salesperson
may contain high costs, but the revenue generated by the salesperson may justify the
investment

Topic 17- Analytic functions

AVERAGE_RANK
AVERAGE_RANK orders the members of a dimension based on the values of an
expression. The function returns the sequence numbers of the dimension members.

AVERAGE_RANK assigns the same average rank to identical values. For example,
AVERAGE_RANK may return 1, 2, 3.5, 3.5, 5 for a series of five dimension members.

AVG
AVG returns the average of a selection of values calculated over a Time dimension. Use
this function to create cumulative averages and moving averages.

COUNT
COUNT tallies the number of data values identified by a selection of members in a Time
dimension.

DENSE_RANK
DENSE_RANK orders the members of a dimension based on the values of an expression.
The function returns the sequence numbers of the dimension members.

DENSE_RANK assigns the same minimum rank to identical values, and returns the results
in a sequential list. The result may be fewer ranks than values in the series. For example,
DENSE_RANK may return 1, 2, 3, 3, 4 for a series of five dimension members.

LAG
LAG returns the value from an earlier time period.

LAG_VARIANCE
LAG_VARIANCE returns the difference between values for the current time period and an
earlier period.

LEAD_VARIANCE_PERCENT
LEAD_VARIANCE_PERCENT returns the percent difference between values for the
current time period and the offset period.

MAX
MAX returns the largest of a selection of data values calculated over a Time dimension.

MIN
MIN returns the smallest of a selection of data values calculated over a Time dimension.

RANK

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RANK orders the members of a dimension based on the values of an expression. The
function returns the sequence numbers of the dimension members.

RANK assigns the same rank to identical values. For example, RANK may return 1, 2, 3,
3, 5 for a series of five dimension members.

ROW_NUMBER
ROW_NUMBER orders the members of a dimension based on the values of an expression.
The function returns the sequence numbers of the dimension members.

ROW_NUMBER assigns a unique rank to each dimension member; for identical values,
the rank is arbitrary. For example, ROW_NUMBER always returns 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 for a series
of five dimension members, even when they have the same value.

SUM
SUM returns the total of a selection of values calculated over a Time dimension. You can
use the SUM function to create period-to-date calculations

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