Business Intelligence

Like any other IT project, business intelligence projects have a high risk of failure. Here are 5 reasons why your BI project will fail. Absent or Weak Business Sponsor A strong business sponsor is the most important ingredient for a successful business intelligence sponsor. This person needs to be well-respected within your organization and be able to make decisions for the organization. If the CIO is your business sponsor, you are in for a world of trouble....

If you are attempting to find out why the data showing on your business objects web intelligence document is incorrect, you may want to start by looking at filters. Once you have verified that the query (data provider) is correct and returning the correct result set, the next step is to look at the filters in your document. For instance, look at the web intelligence report block below. The query that created this report block included all accounts, but only 1 account is showing in the table....

So you think you have a data quality problem, or you have been told that you have a data quality problem. Let me tell you, you don’t. Even with the fanciest data quality tool, etl engine, or business intelligence application; your data quality problems are not going to go away. In Reengineering the Corporation, Hammer states: Seemingly small data quality issues are, in reality, important indications of broken business processes...

Dimensional modeling is a data modeling technique in data warehouse design. Dimensional models use facts and dimensions to describe data for the business. Facts are typically numeric values that are additive (can be aggregated). Dimensions are descriptive elements used for grouping, labeling, and filtering facts. In the schema below: units_sold is a fact date, store, and product are dimensions all the other data elements are attributes of a dimension Dimensional models are typically represented using a star schema....

A question that I often receive is: “What should I do to learn how to develop ETL mappings using Informatica PowerCenter?” Here are the steps that I would take to learn how to do extract, transform, and load with Informatica PowerCenter. I assume that you already have knowledge of SQL. If you don’t know SQL or need to learn more about SQL, I would recommend that you buy Learning SQL by Alan Beaulieu....