SQL Server Business Intelligence Edition – A Primer

Often the nuggets of information lying scattered in your data repository can be a goldmine. With the proper tools you can correlate the data you have into trends and

pointers that can give you several insights about your business including customers and other stakeholders. Depending on your data, the insights you draw out can be used to make better informed decisions, optimize your process and even increase sales. Let’s take an example of a restaurant chain. With a powerful BI tool at their disposal the management can learn which products are getting the highest draw and which other products are being purchased together with them. They can decide on items they can possibly remove and identify outlets that are performing below par on certain lines as compared to others. However to adequately make sense of the data you need to have a specialized business intelligence tool that can integrate with your database. Now thanks to Microsoft, you can have same functionality inbuilt in your database with the SQL Server Business Intelligence Edition. Let’s explore the advantages offered by this interesting iteration of SQL Server in detail.

Get a holistic picture and exceptional visualization

The BI edition can obtain data from multiple sources and place it at one place for easy reference. Using its Power View feature you can dynamically go through the data correlate them as per your need. The application provides you stunning visualization of data through the use of relevant graphics and charts. You can even export the data in multiple formats and later study them with a different application like Ms Excel. 

Deploy a central reporting and analytics platform

A centralized reporting platform, whether web based on a SharePoint server can be created from where multiple stakeholders can access their desired reports. The application allows you to create custom reports, set reminders via email and even create alerts. It gives you a whole bouquet of drill down options and helps you draw connections.

Give user the choice to draw their own insights

The BI edition of SQL Server can used to assign user rights to create their own dashboards. In other words your accounts team can have a dashboard dedicated to their KPIs while the sales team can have a separate one for their functions. 

Your corporate SQL Server implementation remains vulnerable to data loss

While there is a distinct possibility that your backup processes and failsafe would prevent any incidents of data loss from arising, it is always better to remain for any eventuality that you may need to encounter. Hence if you are using the SQL Server database to run critical applications then you need keep a copy of DataNumen SQL Recovery handy. This neat sql recovery tool is designed to help you get back all your data in quick time and it is primed to recover data from sparse columns too. Without doubt it is best application in its class and it can also deal with large corrupt SQL files with ease. 

Author Introduction:

Alan Chen is President & Chairman of DataNumen, Inc., which is the world leader in data recovery technologies, including access recovery and sql recovery software products. For more information visit http://www.datanumen.com/