SQL Server Accelerator for BI Overview
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Reduced time to market is a competitive advantage in today's fast-moving, information-driven economy. To respond rapidly in this environment, companies must be able to quickly and easily access the information they need to make decisions that impact their customers, sales and profit growth opportunities, and business operations. However, most companies do not have the systems in place to effectively manage their business. Many organizations have deployed enterprise applications to improve operational processes, but the applications fail to supply knowledge workers with the insight needed to make informed business decisions.
Business intelligence enables industry leaders to provide knowledge workers with the data they need to make more informed business decisions. Over time, these decisions can have a dramatic bottom-line impact on the business. With a business intelligence solution, your organization can analyze:
| • | Product performance. Understand sales trends, product mix and seasonality issues, product profitability, product life cycle issues, and determine which products will bring greatest opportunity for return on investment (ROI). |
| • | Customer trends. Understand customer buying habits, shift focus to customers that will bring greatest ROI, and devise strategies to increase customer base or retain existing customers. |
| • | Marketing campaigns. Reduce the cost per lead and improve the quality of the marketing pipeline by measuring the success of your marketing campaigns. |
| • | Sales performance. Measure sales information to help sales managers identify low-performing areas and spotlight the most successful sales channels. |
| • | Order and shipment trends. Focus resources and sales force on greater opportunities by understanding order trends, backlog trends, and sales cycles. |
Microsoft SQL Server Accelerator for Business Intelligence (SQL Server Accelerator for BI) represents a new approach to building valuable business intelligence solutions faster and at a lower cost. Developed by Microsoft and Symmetry Corporation, SQL Server Accelerator for BI reduces the time it takes to build and deploy a customized business intelligence solution by putting existing best practices to work, enabling partners and Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS) to deliver solidly built custom applications.
Packaged application approaches are too generic to meet the specific needs of any particular business, requiring extensive and expensive customization to address specific business needs. With SQL Server Accelerator for BI, your business intelligence solution can be quickly customized to meet your organization's needs, fitting the solution to your business. This means you get the solution you want without having to conform to pre-defined templates and designs that restrict your organization's key analytical capabilities.
SQL Server Accelerator for BI Features
SQL Server Accelerator for BI includes a number of key features to help you quickly build valuable, customized business intelligence solutions. Review the following sections to learn more about some of the features of SQL Server Accelerator for BI.
Rapid Development Tool
SQL Server Accelerator for BI enables organizations to quickly customize their business intelligence solution through the Analytics Builder Workbook, which is a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that enables IT organizations and Microsoft Solution Providers to modify or create custom analytical applications based on specific business requirements. With the Analytics Builder Workbook, you can configure your application data model to meet your specific needs. The Analytics Builder Workbook automatically generates your business intelligence solution infrastructure based on your application data model. The infrastructure built by the Analytics Builder Workbook includes a staging database, a relational database, an online analytical processing (OLAP) database, Data Transformation Services (DTS) packages, and preconfigured views of the business intelligence data in the OLAP database.
Data Models
Developed by experienced consultants, data models for SQL Server Accelerator for BI serve as a starting point for developing BI solutions that meet customers' needs. The data models consist of relational and multidimensional database schemas, dimensions, measures, key performance indicators (KPIs), and client views.
In addition to an empty data model for those who want to start their design from scratch, SQL Server Accelerator for BI ships with sample data models for sales and marketing analysis and retail analysis:
| • | Retail analytics. The retail analytics data model focuses on store operation and includes measures and KPIs to support sales performance, fraud detection, store performance, and marketing campaign analysis. |
| • | Sales and marketing analytics. The sales and marketing analytics data model is more horizontally-focused and includes measures and KPIs to support orders and backlogs, sales and shipments, returns analysis by customer type, sales force performance, and marketing campaign analysis. |
Demos and Starter Templates
Demos and starter templates for manufacturing and financial services are also available as separate downloads.
| • | Manufacturing. The manufacturing data model addresses the need to measure shop floor performance to quickly identify production problems, understand their causes, and quickly take action to correct them. Some of the areas covered by this data model include analysis of labor cost, defect and scrap rates, production cost, and equipment servicing needs. |
| • | Financial services. The financial services data model focuses on the needs of retail banking to minimize costs and increase profitability while continuing to provide superior customer service. With this data model, banks can analyze their company-wide financial position, identify their best customer segments, improve their channel effectiveness, and more. |
To download the additional demos and templates, visit the Demos and Templates page.
Client Views
Solutions built with SQL Server Accelerator for BI provide pre-configured client views for various client tools from partners including ProClarity Corporation, Decision Support Panel, MIS AG, and Panorama Software Systems. Visit the SQL Server Accelerator for BI partners page for additional information.
As you modify the data models in the Analytics Builder Workbook, the predefined reports for each client will be modified. This means you can quickly deliver a valuable application customized to your users' requirements.
Data Processing and Movement Infrastructure
SQL Server Accelerator for BI builds a data processing and management application—consisting of DTS packages, metadata tables, and stored procedures—that moves the initial and incremental loads of data within your analytical application and processes the multidimensional cubes within the analysis database. Until now, this type of infrastructure has been built by hand. Even using high-productivity tools like DTS in SQL Server, this is a time-consuming and tedious process.
The data processing and movement infrastructure has traditionally been a roadblock to rapid design iteration, because even a small change in a schema's structure has required handwork to retrofit and test the changes. SQL Server Accelerator for BI provides a flexible, manageable, and extensible data processing and movement infrastructure.
Enterprise Architecture
All business intelligence solutions built with SQL Server Accelerator for BI take advantage of the Microsoft Data Warehousing Framework, which is based on SQL Server 2000 with Analysis Services, Microsoft Office, and the Microsoft Windows 2000 platform. This framework provides a comprehensive, scalable, and extensible infrastructure for business intelligence applications, ensuring your company has a solution that fits your business needs.
The Microsoft Data Warehousing Framework includes everything you need to build powerful analytical applications, including:
| • | A relational database to store the cleansed data. |
| • | An OLAP engine to enable multidimensional data analysis. |
| • | DTS to extract, transform, and load data between systems. |
| • | Data mining capabilities. |
| • | Graphical interfaces. |
| • | A wide range of supported clients. |
Open Standards
Solutions built with SQL Server Accelerator for BI also take advantage of a number of open industry standards native to SQL Server that ensure integration and extensibility with your current environment. The analytical application you create with SQL Server Accelerator for BI will integrate with your existing systems and data sources.
The open standards include the following:
| • | XML-enabled relational database management system (RDBMS) providing easy enterprise application integration. |
| • | OLE DB for OLAP, which integrates a wide range of analysis products. |
| • | XML for Analysis, an XML-based interface supporting flexible data exchange capabilities and enterprise application integration. |
Prescriptive Guidance
When you build a solution with SQL Server Accelerator for BI, prescriptive guidance documentation is included to help you develop the best BI solutions today. The prescriptive guidance includes:
| • | Details on relational and multidimensional database design decisions, including a discussion of alternatives and tradeoffs |
| • | Design and development guidance beyond what is provided in SQL Server Accelerator for BI. |
| • | Best practices settings for configuration of SQL Server 2000 with Analysis Services. |
| • | Advice on methods to optimize the analytical application for best performance. |
| • | Deployment, operations, and management guidance. |
For More Information
To learn more about specific solutions, visit the Partners page.