Microsoft Business Intelligence(BI) Stack

"Business Intelligence" or "BI" is been one of the mostly discussing and most interesting topics in the industry these days. It is a very broad category of applications and technologies that is used to manipulate, discover and analyse data, so after reviewing those data people can take business decisions easily. Microsoft defines BI in the following way.

"Business intelligence (BI) simplifies information discovery and analysis, making it possible for decision-makers at all levels of an organization to more easily access, understand, analyze, collaborate, and act on information, anytime and anywhere."

Since today I am going to write about Microsoft BI Stack, I will try not to write more about BI, because it's a very large topic.

Microsoft first entered into BI market in the year of 1998 with OLAP(online analytical processing) Services in SQL Server 7.0. In 2000, Microsoft released SQL Server 2000. SQL Server 2000 is Microsoft's most significant release of SQL Server to date. With SQL Server 2000 Analysis Services, Microsoft started to touch the grounds of BI. Since first market entry, Microsoft was trying to make BI not only for the few business analysts and some executives but for everyone in the organization. And that's why Microsoft has integrated support for SQL Server Analysis Services(SSAS) into its Office products specially Microsoft Excel. Excel can be used as a SSAS client at a much lower cost than third-party client tools.

Following are the current Microsoft products that supports BI which are known as Microsoft BI Stack and all these things are very large areas which we should learn deeply.

• SQL Server 2008 R2
• SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS)
• SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS)
• SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS)
• Data mining using SSAS
• Excel
• PowerPivot
• SharePoint
• Visio

Microsoft BI Stack

Hoping to write more about BI as I learn. Appreciate your feedback.

Happy Coding.

Regards,

Jaliya