Building a Data Warehouse with SQL Server

What is a data warehouse?

In its simplest form a Data Warehouse is a way to store data information and facts in an format that is informational.  Hopefully, you were able to pull this information from the photos above.   Personally, I like to think of a Data Warehouse as a tool used by decision makers to improve decision‐making.In a relational database model you have tables and columns. In a data warehouse you have facts and dimensions.

What is Business Intelligence?

According to Wikipedia BI refers to skills, technologies, applications and practices used to help a business acquire a better understanding of its commercial context. The following is a definition from Business Intelligence with Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007..
Business intelligence (BI) is more of a concept than a single technology. The goal is to gain insight into the business by bringing together data, formatting it in a way that enables better analysis, and then providing tools that give users power—not just to examine and explore the data, but to quickly understand it. According to Wikipedia BI refers to skills, technologies, applications and practices used to help a business acquire a better understanding of its commercial context. The following is a definition from Business Intelligence with Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007.Business intelligence (BI) is more of a concept than a single technology. The goal is to gain insight into the business by bringing together data, formatting it in a way that enables better analysis, and then providing tools that give users power—not just to examine and explore the data, but to quickly understand it.

What is BI to the users?

BI is fast to query.
BI improves your return on investment (ROI)
BI is a tool that allows users to find what they need.
BI is fast to query. After the initial setup is done, queries can easily run 1000% faster in an OLAP database than in an OLTP database. A perfect example is quering against the CMS_Tat_Time database in development.
BI improves ROI by allowing more end users to make more efficient use of enterprise information so many companies have all the information they need.

Business Cases

A technology department could analyze work completed for departments and/or clients. This could then be used to estimate future flat fee engagements, establish seasonal hiring, balance overtime. A medical center could use statistics covering a wide range of lab values and a large number of patients toidentify whether a patient currently being treated might be at an elevated risk for a certain types of disease.Application that’s great for data entry but lacks in depth reporting and drilldown capabilities.A company who wants to centralize data to a single data source for allowing decision makers the ability to make decisions as needed.