ABSTRACT
Business Intelligence (BI) enables enterprises to access current, correct, consistent, and complete information on any process or transaction to take informed decisions in compliance with its strategy, policy, and procedures. A BI ecosystem consists of data warehouse management tools, ETL (extraction, transformation, loading), data integration, and BI tools. The main BI activities include query, reporting, online analytical processing (OLAP), statistical analysis, forecasting, data mining, and decision support. OLAP accommodates queries that would otherwise have been computationally impossible on a relational database management system. OLAP technology is characterized by multidimensionality, and the concept represents one of its key features. Operational enterprise systems are designed to support traditional reporting requirements such as day books, party ledgers, balance sheets, income statements, and cash flow statements. A major challenge in designing a business intelligence system stems from the relationship between the detailed operational and the aggregated data warehouse systems.
