Summary

In this chapter, you learned what Business Intelligence is and what its components are. You studied the requirement for BI systems, and you saw the solution architecture to solve the requirements. Then, you read about data warehousing and the terminologies in dimensional modeling.

If you come from a DBA or database developer background and are familiar with database normalization, then you will know that in dimensional modeling, you should avoid normalization in some parts and you would need to design a star schema. You've learned that the Fact table shows numeric and additive values, and descriptive information will be stored in dimensions. You've learned different types of facts such as transactional, snapshot, and accumulating, and also learned about different types of dimensions such as outriggers, role playing, and degenerate.

Data warehousing and dimensional modeling together constitute the most important part of the BI system, which is sometimes called the core of the system. In the following chapters, we will go through some of the BI system components such as ETL, OLAP, Dashboards, and reports.