What exactly is business intelligence?

OLAP is that part of the toolset that provides dimensional analysis, allowing large volumes of data to be efficiently available for exploration in a wide variety of formats and arrays.

High-volume data warehousing and special methods of designing its storage were called "Data Storage" (DW). Within the DW, a representation technique called "Dimensional Modeling" evolved, which is aimed at economic access, based on the context (query) of the huge tables contained in the DW database.

Once the data has been captured and organized in this way, through a process known as "Extract, Transform and Load" (ETL), it can be passed through an additional processing step that generates a "Cube".

The Cube, in this context, is actually another highly optimized form of storage in which dimensionally modeled data can be pre-aggregated and cross-mapped for efficient retrieval and presentation to the user, who can enjoy analyzing data at many levels of summary moving quickly between almost limitless varieties of Business Intelligence.

Activities such as setting up multidimensional data summary charts (known as "cut and dice") or moving to lower levels of detail and reverting to highly summarized versions (known as drill and drill) using tools to create graphical representations of cube data, with lots of formats to choose from.

Using other tools to perform sophisticated analysis, whereby trends and anomalies buried deep in the data (a technique called "Data Mining") can be discovered, understood and exploited. Data mining models are created and refined to become responsive and resonant with the data patterns and can be used to generate forecasts of future trends and movements within the tracked data. A veritable gold mine of such gems is hidden and largely unexplored in the "explosive" mountains of data that have accumulated in companies since the price of storage collapsed.

IT organizations seem to have been clinging to data, keeping it in cold storage, knowing that a time will come when it will be beneficial. This is analogous to the aspirants who, on leaving this world, have a frozen brain, waiting for the appearance of technologies that can revive it, perhaps with an artificial body. Business Intelligence is the technology that enables companies to unfreeze their data assets, giving them a much more useful life than ever before. A new era for the use of information?

In the early 18th century, inventors were making new discoveries about heat, energy, and motion. Rapidly evolved locomotion powered by coal, steam (railways) and pumping motors (for mines) and giant power plants to make every machine in a factory spin and spin incessantly. Cotton yarn, knitting cloth, cut and shape iron and then steel. The industrial revolution was born. Mills and factories emerged in the coal-rich fields of northern England (the birthplace of this writer, albeit a little later).

Drawing on their long heritage of gargantuan earthworks, people seeking a steady (monetary) income flocked to understand the many new (but equally dazzling) factory jobs that emanated from the sprawling urban expansion of gleaming brick mazes. red, which hosted these amazing machines. Industrial empires were reproducing everywhere, and future wealthy tycoons (already) united to invest, build, and rule over them.