There’s a funny thing about business intelligence: people are baffled by the technologies involved in building insights but the most challenging things about the discipline have little to do with technology. I’ll grant that using PIVOT and GROUPING SET queries is not trivial but any developer can figure those out in an afternoon. Where I see people struggling more is in deciding which tools to use for BI projects.
Let’s take dashboards as an example. There are a great many dashboarding tools available: stand alone tools, tools for developers, tools for end users, tools for specific applications and tools that run across enterprise data sources. Deciding which of these tools to use isn’t a matter selecting the best of breed tool or even just deciding on the one that comes with your application; it is a question of which tool is best for your organization.
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