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BI Reporting tools are used to generate reports according to the business requirement. Reports are used to enhance decision making to measure the performance of the business. Every company will have the significant volumes of data and the data must transform by consolidating, organizing, storing and analyzing.

History
The BI reporting tools was first proposed and sponsored by Actuate Corporation. It was implemented when Actuate worked with Eclipse foundation as a strategic developer on August 2004.The project was approved by Eclipse community on October 2004.IBM and Innovent solutions,INC were also became the part of the project. In 2007 IBM's Tivoli Division adopted BIRT as the infrastructure for its Tivoli Common Reporting (TCR) product. TCR produces historical reports on Tivoli-managed IT resources and processes. The initial idea was proposed and developed by Actuate in 2004 and BIRT was given to Eclipse Foundation upon approval.

BI Architecture
In BI reporting will be done using two types of strategies and this is called architecture of BI. Following are the two types of strategies where BI tools are installed. They are
 * 2-Tier Architecture: In this type of Architecture, I tools are installed on client machines and reports are generated by directly accessing data ware house or Data marts.
 * 3-Tier Architecture: In this type of Architecture, I reporting server software is installed on server machine. All the clients access the data ware house or the data marts by using a browser.

Types of BI User
The use of BI reporting tools varies from user to user. It is important to analyze the type of users who uses them. Every user gets the access according to the business requirement and the access will be predetermined. Following are the typical users: For Example, a manager of the supermarket store will have the access to his respective store where the manager can see the data in the form of reports to analyze the business. The manager can evaluate and monitor the business. She/he can see the list of products available, list of products to be ordered, maintaining the customer data and employee list. The manager will analyze the business based on the reports that he/she sees. A regional manager of the same supermarket chain will see the overall report of the concerned region. The regional manager can track and monitor the business performance of the entire region. The regional manager will have more reporting options than the store manager because the store manager data is limited whereas the regional manager source data will be in high volumes so regional manager will have to use advanced and powerful reporting tools like dashboards for decision making.
 * Casual User
 * Business user
 * Power user
 * IT user

Reporting Applications
Many reporting applications are available in the market. For every reporting application the source will be a relational database or special multidimensional structures such as cubes. The data warehouse is the significant component of business intelligence. It is subject oriented, integrated. Data sources can be operational databases, historical data, external data for example, from market research companies or from the Internet), or information from the already existing data warehouse environment. The data sources can be relational databases or any other data structure that supports the line of business applications. Data mart contains a static snapshot of operational data focused on a single subject (or functional area), such as Sales, Finance, or Marketing. A data mart is often built and controlled by a single department within an organization and is a simple form of a data warehouse. Multiple users run queries on this data. The source for data mart could be internal operational systems, a central data warehouse, or external data.

Query and reporting
Query is used to retrieve data from data warehouse and transforms the data in to the appropriate context where user can read the data. Query is used for the particular decision support when the query is executed then the respective tool generates the requested data by retrieving the data from the source. In the mean time, multi dimensional analysis has become more popular which can be treated as an extension to query and reporting. Multi dimensional is used instead of multiple queries and it retrieves’ the large volumes of data. It also helps to tract the data step by step and filtering the data. Example, a user can see the report of the state to city to town. The user simply uses the drill down technique to analyze the data or the business performance .Drill-Down helps the user to view the data of his all the chains in the respective state. Multidimensional analysis enables you to look at the business problem by large number of interdependent factors describing the matter. In other words, multidimensional analysis enables you to view the information at different levels of detail or to analyze complex relationships.

The following are multidimensional techniques that are widely used in report generation:
 * Slice and dice
 * Pivoting
 * Data drilling Drill-down, drill-up, and drill-across
 * Roll down and Roll up

Reporting Software
Following are the reporting software’s available in the market:
 * Business Objects
 * Crystal reports
 * MicroStrategy
 * Cognos
 * Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition