Describe The Architecture of BI

Bussiness Intelligence Architecture

What does BI architecture mean? A business intelligence architect (BI architect) is a top-level sort of business intelligence analyst who deals with specific aspects of business intelligence, a discipline that uses data in certain ways and builds specific architectures to benefit a business or organization. The business intelligence architect will generally be responsible for creating or working with these architectures, which serve the specific purpose of maximizing the potential of data assets.

BI architects are often tasked with developing specific data structures or implementations for a set of end users within a business. The business intelligence architect serves as a point person for programs that form an architecture for handling data, including databases, data warehouses and other storage resources. BI architects also commonly work on tasks like linking legacy or enterprise software to BI applications or platforms, and creating or handling meta data that help programs use data more efficiently and accurately.

Generally, a BI architect serves an employer by promoting clarity and efficiency in using data to drive decision-making. The BI architect often contemplates issues like good documentation, changes in IT structures, and bugs or glitches in applications and programs, in an attempt to preserve and create good systems for data use.

Data warehouse

A data warehouse is the foundation for information management and involves:

• Extracting data from operational systems;
• Moving it into data warehouse structures;
• Reorganizing and structuring the data for analysis purposes; and
• Moving it into reporting structures called data marts. 

What architecture components are involved with warehouse design?

* Data warehouses are comprised of:

• System processes;
• Process architecture; and
• Hardware architecture.
• What are system processes?

*System processes include:

• Extract and load processes;
• Transformation and data cleansing processes;
• Data backup and archiving processes; and
• Reporting management processes.

|What is process architecture?

Process architecture includes the process required to handle and manage daily operations. They include:

Extract and load management process, which includes all of the software and utilities required to:

Extract source system data and move it to the warehouse environment, Fast load data into a staging area where it can be subsequently manipulated, and Complete basic transformation to ensure that non-essential data is eliminated and other data is converted to appropriate data types.

Warehouse manager, which includes:

Software and utilities required to perform management functions such as:

Ensuring referential integrity, Transforming staging area data into formats suitable for loading into the data warehouse, Dropping indexes, if needed to optimize load performance, and recreating them when the load is complete, Creating de-normalized data structures if needed for reporting performance, Generating and maintaining data aggregations, and Moving data to archival storage.

Reconciliation routines, which include all of the routines, needed to ensure that data is reconciled with itself;

Transforming data into a star schema, which involves:

• Creating fact tables.
• Creating dimensions and handling slowly changing dimensions.
• Summarizing data if required for reporting performance.