Chapter 7 - Technology & Product Architectures

Abstract

The technology categories that support business intelligence (BI) and data integration are technology platforms, enterprise applications, and data management. BI appliances usually combine hardware and software into one offering, although some are software only. The BI technology architecture is made up of four layers, as follows. (1) BI and analytics (analyzing information) includes reporting, ad hoc analysis, dashboards, online analytical processing (OLAP), spreadsheets, predictive analytics, performance management, data discovery, data visualization, Big Data analytics, BI search, mobile BI and cloud BI. (2) Information access and data integration (gathering, integrating, and transforming data into information) spans the sources, integration applications, integration services, data access application programming interfaces (APIs) and BI targets. (3) Data warehousing, which uses databases or files to store integrated data that is then be consumed by BI and analytics, generally uses relational databases for structured and semistructured data, and alternative databases for unstructured data. Alternatives include OLAP, columnar, in-database analytics, in-memory analytics, and massively parallel processing (MPP). (4) Data sources capture data for use in the enterprise. With Big Data, enterprises are experiencing rising data volumes, variety, and velocity. Thorough product and technology evaluations are essential.