In the BI Report development world there are a few key concepts
and terminologies repeated quite often. So if one is looking into making a career
in this area then it will be a wise idea to know some of these concepts and
terminologies.
Let us start by classifying BI reports into various categories by using their
functional purposes as the classifier. This classification of types of reports given below may not
be necessarily observed or followed in all of the organizations. But the
chances that a given report fits into one of these categories is pretty high
for any given organization.
Management Reports: Historically, this is the most prevalent
nomenclature for data and reporting that shows things like project status,
profit and loss, budget vs. actual, etc. They are generally reports
reviewed by upper management, with summary data and minimal detail data.
Daily Operational Reports: This reflects the type of reporting used
by bookkeepers on a daily or routine basis – and mostly used to scan for
errors, data entry problems, regulatory purpose, or even backup for a
management report. These reports may contain data from the lower most
granularity/level of the fact tables.
Custom Reports: Custom denotes something that is not off
the shelf, or needs additional manipulation that needs to be done in the
reporting environment to suite the user needs. Both management reporting
and daily operational can fall in this category.
Ad-Hoc
Reports: An ad-hoc report is created by sending a request or query, for specific
information and the query results show the most current information in the
format you specify. Business users generally fire in ad-hoc report queries to
get instant answers to their questions.
It is also important to know at least a few
concepts or techniques used in a common BI Reporting environment. The below
listed concepts are very important to be understood well by any BI Report
developer.
Drill Down: A component of OLAP analysis. The term drill down,
in the context of data analysis, refers to the process of navigating from less
detailed aggregated information to viewing more granular data.
Drill
Through: Drill through is an action in which one moves
horizontally between two items via a related link. An example to drill through
is in the case of two reports that are in a master /detail relation with each
other, and by clicking a master item on the master report you reach the details
of the clicked item on the details report.
Drill Up
(Roll up): It is a specific analytical technique whereby the
user navigates among levels of data ranging from the most detailed (down) to
the most summarized (up) along a concept hierarchy. For example, when viewing
the data for the city of Toronto, a roll-up operation in the Location dimension
would display Ontario. A further roll-up on Ontario would display data for
Canada.
Report Prompts: A prompt is an object that enables users to input values for filtering the data. For
example, allowing users to select from a pick list to show data by a particular
product category or region. The parameters are passed on by the report server to the database server and used in the where or having clause of a SQL query that
selects the data for the report.
There are many more concepts, techniques, terminologies involved in BI Report and Dashboard development. These concepts sink in and get ingrained in a BI Developers lingo as he/she gains experience. I hope that the posts so far in this blog has helped a novice to get started in any one of the BI tool out there in the market. I intend to come up with more posts related to BI and Data Analytics, please stay tuned!
References:
http://www.elegantjbi.com/resources/glossary_a.htm
http://www.sleeter.com/blog/understanding-business-intelligence-and-related-terminology/
