CODEWITHSUNDEEP
reportingpowerbidata-warehouseazure-data-lakeerp
rgullhaug
rgullhaug

Reputation: 1115

Modern Business Intelligence solution

What is the modern way of building a Business Intelligence solution? I have looked at PowerBI, but I'm wondering what would be the best datasource for it. Is it still traditional datawarehouse solutions that should be used as a datasource? I also hear a lot talk about data lakes, but don't know much about. Or should I just use a regular relational database as the source? Do anyone have any opinions and tips on this?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 206

Answers (2)

Lena Weber
Lena Weber

Reputation: 272

Start with your data.

  1. Do you have a data warehouse now? If no,

  2. Where is your data, databases, Excel, email? Data in databases, like MySQL, is structured. Data in email or other documents is unstructured. Depending on where your data lives impacts how you will analyze it (which is what BI is all about, in the end.) (And a side note, data lakes are best for analyzing structured, semi-structured and unstructured data together. For example if you queried for data in documentation, a SQL DB and older MS Access data dumps.)

  3. If you have data in different databases and systems, then I would recommend you start with a data warehouse. There are many options, one of the easier ones today is using a cloud-based solution (AWS, Microsoft, etc.)

  4. Once your data is in a location(s) where it can be queried and analyzed as a total data set then you can look at the BI tools that fit your needs.

    4.a. What type of analysis do you need? Queries? Trends? Complex data calculations and transformations?

  5. Based on 4.a. look at the tools in the market. PowerBI is just one of a whole variety of data analysis tools and systems on the market. There are many resources on the web, Google ETL tools.

After all of this you can narrow down your choices and select the solution that works best for you.

Upvotes: 1

Babar
Babar

Reputation: 61

I think your starting point in your thinking is wrong. You don't chose a front end BI / Dashboard tool and then think what source would be best to connect to it.

You start from your data & information that you want to analyze, report & visualize. Think of structure & variety of data and complexity of analysis, correlations, integrations & business logic.

Then decide how are you going to Store the data Process / Transform the data to correlate, integrate or enrich report or visualize the data

And its only in step 3 from above high level tasks that you come to start thinking of which Analysis / visualization tool is best fit for such data & its integrations with data storage platform I have as well as nature of the data itself.

That will most likely bring you more success than thinking about it the way you posed that question.

I hope it helps.

Upvotes: 1

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