Rapidly Emerging Technology Series: Self-Service BI

The Rapidly Emerging Technology Series highlights current technologies that are relevant to data warehouse professionals.  This posting discusses self-service BI.

A very rapidly evolving area of information access is called Self-service Business Intelligence or Self-service BI.  Business users want more flexible access to information than standard reports can provide and not have to rely on analysts who can write code.

For many years, companies like Cognos and MicroStrategies have provided BI tools that work on top of relational databases.  Typically, the database team would set up a star schema data mart, and BI developers would create a browser-based front end would allow easy grouping and aggregation (slice-and-dice) access to the data with sums and counts.  BI products also provide tools to build dashboards that give very current views of data—typically in an operational data store (ODS).  Dashboards can also include data visualization in the form of graphs and gauges.

However, these tools are evolving to include much more sophisticated access for users.  Unlike older BI tools that sat on top of a pre-defined data mart, newer self-service BI products provide access to multiple data sources including enterprise databases as well as publicly accessible databases and subscription databases on the web.  The BI tool allows for integration of these diverse data sources at the user level for complex reports and graphs.

Most analyses involve more than single queries.  There is usually a discovery process which leads to more questions and subsequently more analyses.  Newer BI products support this discovery process.  Self-service BI allows an analysis to be built upon by easily changing variables, adding data sources, re-use of results, and so on.

Newer BI tools are being developed that also allow mobile access from a variety of devices. Users will increasingly need to access and visualize data from their smart phones and tablets.

Microsoft has invested heavily in Self-service BI.  Their SQL Server product contains tools that allow tight integration with Excel and all of its analytical and graphing capabilities as well as with SharePoint to promote various types of live data access throughout an organization.  SQL Server 2012 which will be released in coming months has a tool called PowerView which is a very flexible and powerful BI front end.  It supports integration of diverse data sources at the user level, self-service alerts, sophisticated graphing, document authoring with live data updates, and many other analytical tools.

(A pre-release version of SQL Server 2012 is available for free download at http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/en/us/get-sql-server/try-it.aspx.)