BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE TOOLS:

The phrase business intelligence (BI for short) is the combination of software applications,
methodologies and business systems that play a key role in the strategic planning process
of a corporation.
Business intelligence software is a type of application software designed to retrieve,
analyze, transform and report data for business intelligence. The applications generally
read data that has been previously stored, often - though not necessarily - in a data
warehouse or data mart.
Most companies collect huge amounts of data from its business operations. Keeping track
of that information requires a wide range of software programs and different database
applications for various departments (e.g. sales, finance, supply) throughout the
organization to access and use the data.
Using multiple software programs makes it difficult to retrieve information in a timely
manner and to perform analysis of the data. A business intelligence solution replaces the
multiple tools traditionally used to collect and analyze the data.
In many ways business intelligence is a catch-all phrase as it does not refer to one single
type of analysis or data, but rather it represents a variety of methodologies, technologies,
and software applications and tools to organize and analyze all of a businesses' data.
The effect of a business intelligence system, however, is much easier to define. The BI
system takes all the raw data and provides an organization with useful and relevant
reports and graphs that management and decision-makers within the organization can
make sense of -- and then use -- to analyze business trends to capitalize on.

Business Intelligence Software:

Business intelligence software (also called BI software) is software that is designed

specifically to analyze all the business data, through automated processes, to provide a
better understand an organization's strengths and weaknesses. It is the organization's
business intelligence software that allows management to better see the relationship
between different data for better decision-making and deployment of resources. Business
Intelligence software plays a key role in the strategic planning process of the corporation.
Business intelligence software is often referred to as business intelligence tools (BI tools)
representing a number of software applications that integrate to provide the means to
report, analyze and then present the data. Business intelligence software is also designed
to use data that is stored by the business in a any type of data storage system or data
warehouse.
The types of tools that make up a business intelligence software application solution
generally include tools for spreadsheets, operational dashboards, data mining, reporting,
search (query), analytics processing (OLAP), content viewer, and other components of
enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. Often, business intelligence software may
also integrate tools designed for specific verticals, such as retail, healthcare or education.
Business intelligence software applications can be deployed in a number of ways, with the
following being the most common options.

Types:
The key general categories of business intelligence applications are:

1) Spreadsheets:
A spreadsheet is an interactive computer application for organization, analysis and
storage of data in tabular form. developed as computerized analogs of paper accounting
worksheets.The program operates on data entered in cells of a table. Each cell may
contain either numeric or text data, or the results of formulas that automatically calculate
and display a value based on the contents of other cells. A spreadsheet may also refer to
one such electronic document.
Spreadsheet users can adjust any stored value and observe the effects on calculated
values. This makes the spreadsheet useful for "what-if" analysis since many cases can be
rapidly investigated without manual recalculation. Modern spreadsheet software can have
multiple interacting sheets, and can display data either as text and numerals, or in
graphical form.
Besides performing basic arithmetic and mathematical functions, modern spreadsheets
provide built-in functions for common financial and statistical operations. Such calculations
as net present value or standard deviation can be applied to tabular data with a pre-
programmed function in a formula. Spreadsheet programs also provide conditional
expressions, functions to convert between text and numbers, and functions that operate on
strings of text.

2) Data mining:
Data mining is the process of discovering patterns in large data sets involving methods at
the intersection of machine learning, statistics, and database systems. Data mining is an
interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and statistics with an overall goal to extract
information (with intelligent methods) from a data set and transform the information into a
comprehensible structure for further use. Data mining is the analysis step of the
"knowledge discovery in databases" process, or KDD. Aside from the raw analysis step, it
also involves database and data management aspects, data pre-processing, model and
inference considerations, interestingness metrics, complexity considerations, post-
processing of discovered structures, visualization, and online updating. The difference
between data analysis and data mining is that data analysis is to summarize the history
such as analyzing the effectiveness of a marketing campaign, in contrast, data mining
focuses on using specific machine learning and statistical models to predict the future and
discover the patterns among data.
The term "data mining" is in fact a misnomer, because the goal is the extraction of patterns
and knowledge from large amounts of data, not the extraction (mining) of data itself. It also
is a buzzword and is frequently applied to any form of large-scale data or information
processing (collection, extraction, warehousing, analysis, and statistics) as well as any
application of computer decision support system, including artificial intelligence (e.g.,
machine learning) and business intelligence. The book Data mining: Practical machine
learning tools and techniques with Java (which covers mostly machine learning material)
was originally to be named just Practical machine learning, and the term data mining was
only added for marketing reasons.Often the more general terms (large scale) data
analysis and analytics – or, when referring to actual methods, artificial intelligence and
machine learning – are more appropriate.
The actual data mining task is the semi-automatic or automatic analysis of large quantities
of data to extract previously unknown, interesting patterns such as groups of data records
(cluster analysis), unusual records (anomaly detection), and dependencies (association
rule mining, sequential pattern mining). This usually involves using database techniques
such as spatial indices. These patterns can then be seen as a kind of summary of the
input data, and may be used in further analysis or, for example, in machine learning and
predictive analytics. For example, the data mining step might identify multiple groups in the
data, which can then be used to obtain more accurate prediction results by a decision
support system. Neither the data collection, data preparation, nor result interpretation and
reporting is part of the data mining step, but do belong to the overall KDD process as
additional steps.
The related terms data dredging, data fishing, and data snooping refer to the use of data
mining methods to sample parts of a larger population data set that are (or may be) too
small for reliable statistical inferences to be made about the validity of any patterns
discovered. These methods can, however, be used in creating new hypotheses to test
against the larger data populations.
Data mining involves six common classes of tasks:
• Anomaly detection (outlier/change/deviation detection) – The identification of
unusual data records, that might be interesting or data errors that require further
investigation.
• Association rule learning (dependency modelling) – Searches for relationships
between variables. For example, a supermarket might gather data on customer
purchasing habits. Using association rule learning, the supermarket can determine
which products are frequently bought together and use this information for
marketing purposes. This is sometimes referred to as market basket analysis.
• Clustering – is the task of discovering groups and structures in the data that are in
 some way or another "similar", without using known structures in the data.
• Classification – is the task of generalizing known structure to apply to new data. For
example, an e-mail program might attempt to classify an e-mail as "legitimate" or as
"spam".

• Regression – attempts to find a function which models the data with the least error
for estimating the relationships among data or datasets.
• Summarization – providing a more compact representation of the data set, including
visualization and report generation.

3) Data warehouse:
In computing, a data warehouse (DW or DWH), also known as an enterprise data
warehouse (EDW), is a system used for reporting and data analysis, and is considered a
core component of business intelligence. DWs are central repositories of integrated data
from one or more disparate sources. They store current and historical data in one single
place that are used for creating analytical reports for workers throughout the enterprise.
The data stored in the warehouse is uploaded from the operational systems (such as marketing or
sales). The data may pass through an operational data store and may require data cleansing for
additional operations to ensure data quality before it is used in the DW for reporting.
The typical extract, transform, load (ETL)-based data warehouse uses staging, data integration, and
access layers to house its key functions. The staging layer or staging database stores raw data
extracted from each of the disparate source data systems. The integration layer integrates the
disparate data sets by transforming the data from the staging layer often storing this transformed
data in an operational data store (ODS) database. The integrated data are then moved to yet another
database, often called the data warehouse database, where the data is arranged into hierarchical
groups, often called dimensions, and into facts and aggregate facts. The combination of facts and
dimensions is sometimes called a star schema. The access layer helps users retrieve data.
The main source of the data is cleansed, transformed, catalogued, and made available for use by
managers and other business professionals for data mining, online analytical processing, market
research and decision support. However, the means to retrieve and analyze data, to extract,
transform, and load data, and to manage the data dictionary are also considered essential
components of a data warehousing system. Many references to data warehousing use this broader
context. Thus, an expanded definition for data warehousing includes business intelligence tools,
tools to extract, transform, and load data into the repository, and tools to manage and retrieve
metadata.

Benefits:
A data warehouse maintains a copy of information from the source transaction systems. This
architectural complexity provides the opportunity to:
• Integrate data from multiple sources into a single database and data model. More
congregation of data to single database so a single query engine can be used to present data
 in an ODS.
• Mitigate the problem of database isolation level lock contention in transaction processing
systems caused by attempts to run large, long-running, analysis queries in transaction
processing databases.
• Maintain data history, even if the source transaction systems do not.
• Integrate data from multiple source systems, enabling a central view across the enterprise.
This benefit is always valuable, but particularly so when the organization has grown by
merger.
• Improve data quality, by providing consistent codes and descriptions, flagging or even fixing
bad data.
• Present the organization's information consistently.
• Provide a single common data model for all data of interest regardless of the data's source.
• Restructure the data so that it makes sense to the business users.
• Restructure the data so that it delivers excellent query performance, even for complex
analytic queries, without impacting the operational systems.
• Add value to operational business applications, notably customer relationship management
(CRM) systems.
• Make decision–support queries easier to write.
• Organize and disambiguate repetitive data