Lets start this new year with a small introduction to Microsoft SQL Server Business Intelligence or MSBI. In short it’s another “very” popular BI tool like Pentaho BI Suite build by Microsoft.
MSBI provides you with a complete suite to work around your BI needs/requirements. This tools provides you with easy plugins to develop your BI needs and can do powerful data mining activities. Basically MSBI is divided into 3 major components, as below:
- SQL Server Integration Services – In short SSIS. This is the data integration part of the MSBI Suite. As all other data integration does, it provides you with all the ETL features wherein you can easily gather data from various source systems, transform your data using your business logic and finally load your data to you data warehouse or data mart.
- SQL Server Analysis Services – This is the place where you receive the data from data marts/data warehouse to build cube. SSAS (in short) allows you to build multi-dimensional data models or CUBES to pre-calculate and store these data into a the data for the end user to build analysis on top of it.
- SQL Server Reporting Services – In Short SSRS is the reporting tool used to generate reports from the data calculated above. This is the reporting/dashboarding layer provided by Microsoft for developing reports from the analyzed data.
Well this is typically a MSBI stack. Microsoft BI has a close integration with the tools they provide. It becomes easier to perform your BI activities if you are using their tools. You can also choose to use either of their stack like SSIS or SSAS or SSRS.
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