Business Intelligence Platform Overview

SQL Server’s business intelligence (BI) platform enables an organization to analyze historical data from business applications, such as transaction processing and customer relationship management applications. As shown in this hypothetical deployment, the platform (middle) is used to design and manage databases and develop BI applications. End users (top) view and work with data indirectly through applications such as the SharePoint Server Web portal and collaboration platform or directly using analysis tools such as Excel.

The SQL Server BI platform consists of three main components:

Integration Services supports the extract, transform, and load process, which regularly pulls data from the organization’s business applications and standardizes (e.g., converts dates and column names into common formats) and loads those data into a historical data warehouse.

Analysis Services manages specialized analytic databases (called cubes) that efficiently summarize large volumes of historical data. In the illustration, cubes are built from the organization’s data warehouse. Users can work directly with cubes using tools such as the Excel spreadsheet application, as shown, to answer business-related questions.