Professional SQL Server™ Analysis Services 2005 with MDX

Chapter 1. Introduction to Data Warehousing and Analysis Services 2005

A data warehouse is a system that takes data from a company's databases and other data sources and transforms it into a structure conducive to business analysis. Mathematical operations are often performed on the newly structured or organized data to further its usefulness for making business decisions. Finally, the data is made available to the end user for querying and analysis. If the data warehouse is well architected then queries to the data warehouse will return query results quickly (in a matter of seconds). The business decision-maker will have a powerful tool that could never have been effectively used directly from the company's daily operational systems. We consider data analysis to be of two forms. The first requires a person to investigate the data for trends. This method is called On Line Analytical Processing (OLAP). The second form utilizes algorithms to scour the data looking for trends. This method is called Data Mining. Analysis Services 2005 is a business intelligence platform that enables you to use OLAP and Data Mining. Now that you have the big picture of data warehousing, let us look at what you will learn in this chapter.

In this chapter you learn what data warehousing really is and how it relates to business intelligence. This information comes wrapped in a whole load of new concepts, and you get a look at the best known approaches to warehousing with the introduction of those concepts. ...