Focus on Decisions


Whereas OLTP business systems are built to store data and update it for running the day-to-day aspects of a business, BI solutions are built to enable decision-making. Operational OLTP systems are good at inserting new records and doing lookups for specific records, but they are not optimized for summarizing that data for analysis. A good BI solution enables users to develop comparisons of information across the organization and over time by consolidating data that might be held in multiple formats on separate systems and by maintaining history more effectively than is often possible in OLTP systems. In addition, a BI solution is optimized for online exploration of large quantities of data through pre-defined relationships and pre-calculated aggregations. SQL Server 2005 includes Analysis Services for this specific purpose. Analysis Services is an OLAP data engine that stores and manages data much differently than the rows and columns of an OLTP database. An OLAP system is almost always used in conjunction with a relational data warehouse. The relational store provides a manageable repository of reliable business data, and the OLAP engine provides an efficient structure for retrieving data designed specifically to meet business reporting requirements. Rather than tables, the OLAP system stores data in multidimensional cubes. Compared with relational table schemas, dimensions and cubes are relatively easy to design and can be adapted to meet changing business reporting requirements.

When relational OLTP databases become large and complicated, retrieving data through complex queries becomes very slow and cumbersome. By contrast, the difference in query performance for a similar OLAP system can be phenomenal. If designed with the business reporting requirements in mind, the degree of query complexity can be reduced exponentially.




Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Integration Services Step by Step
MicrosoftВ® SQL Server(TM) 2005 Integration Services Step by Step
ISBN: 0735624054
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2007
Pages: 152

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net