Chapter 5: First StepsBeginning the Development of Business Intelligence

There is a great satisfaction in building good tools for other people to use.
—Freeman Dyson

Overview

Now that we have discussed the basics of business intelligence and OLAP, it is time to become acquainted with the tools that we are going to be using. Microsoft has created a brand-new tool for creating and managing Business Intelligence (we use the acronym BI to refer to Business Intelligence throughout the book) as part of SQL Server 2005. This is the Business Intelligence Development Studio.

We begin this chapter with a tour of this tool. The Business Intelligence Development Studio looks familiar to those of you who have used Microsoft Visual Studio as part of front-end or middleware development projects. In fact, the Business Intelligence Development Studio is Visual Studio with some special functionality.

So, with a nod to Tim "The Tool Man" Taylor, here is a tool that can give us "more power" when it comes to creating BI solutions.