Microsoft’s SQL Server 2005 business intelligence (BI) platform supports data analysis, warehousing, and reporting. It helps organizations cull actionable information from the volumes of raw data stored in operational databases-to understand sales trends and structure promotions accordingly, for instance. Shown here is a typical system that collects data from operational data sources (right) such as retail store point-of-sale systems and marketing databases, consolidates these into a historical database called a data warehouse (center), and distributes the data to users who need to analyze or get regular reports on the data (left).

Microsoft’s BI platform provides three main services:

Integration Services supports extract, transform, and load (ETL) data integration processes, which are commonly used to update data warehouses on a periodic basis. In the illustration, Integration Services extracts data from a variety of online data sources, which can include non-Microsoft sources, such as Oracle databases. It combines, cleanses, and summarizes those data; for example, it might standardize the geographic codes used for retail store locations, or the formats of dates. Finally, it populates the data warehouse with the summarized data.

Integration Services is part of Microsoft’s SQL Server 2005 business intelligence (BI) platform. Integration Services is a middleware utility that supports the extract, transform, and load (ETL) data integration process, which is commonly used to update data warehouses on a periodic basis. In the illustration, Integration Services extracts data from a variety of operational databases, transforms those data (for example, aggregating and correlating rows from tables extracted from the various sources or performing data type conversions), and loads the transformed data into a data warehouse built from Microsoft SQL Server databases in the diagram. Coupled with SQL Server’s Analysis Services and Reporting Services (additional components that support data mining and analysis, and report creation and distribution, respectively), these components constitute a powerful data analysis, warehousing, and reporting system that allows companies to cull actionable business information from the volumes of raw data stored in the operational databases-to understand sales trends and structure promotions accordingly, for instance.