Business Intelligence, OLAP, and ETL

Business Intelligence is no longer the province of only the largest enterprises; it is now well within reach for medium-size and smaller firms, even without a budget for high end tools. Surprisingly good BI can be put in place for a few tens of thousands of dollars.

Making BI Work

There are plenty of vendors eager with a sales pitch for BI/OLAP projects, eager also to give you the impression that all you need to do is buy their product. This is wrong, perhaps dangerously so, because the heart of BI / OLAP is your data and the core challenge is to transform your data into a form where it can be easily and correctly analyzed.

The principles of operation are similar regardless of which products you choose. Your toolset will consist of, at minimum:

• An OLAP tool, with or without a RDBMS behind it
• An ETL tool, which might be a software product or might be a set of scripts
• Hardware to run it on, chosen and configured to server an analytic load well; this could be hardware you own, or a SaaS or cloud offering

Whether you’ve chosen your tools already or not, Oasis Digital can engage on the critical, core work of understanding your data (from one or many operational systems) and converting in to a form well-suited for analysis, in a sufficiently efficient ways to keep up production data updates. There are no shortcuts with this work, no way to avoid the gritty details and nuances (including unintentional, legacy concerns) of the exact meaning of the data values from your production database systems.

Consider Open Source BI

Oasis Digital can assist you with choosing, designing, implementing, and deploying an open source BI solution, using Mondrian and related tools such as those from Pentaho or JReport plus a RDBMS like PostgreSQL or MySQL behind the scenes. These toolsets are not yet as polished as (for example) the popular Microsoft SQL Analysis Services, but they are nonetheless well suited for production use.