OLAP Tools And The Internet

OLAP Tools And The Internet

The mainly comprehensive premises in computing have been the internet and data warehousing thus the integration of these two giant technologies is a necessity. The advantages of using the Web for access are inevitable.(Reference 3) These advantages are:

·     The internet provides connectivity between countries acting as a free resource.

·     The web eases administrative tasks of managing scattered locations.

·     The Web allows users to store and manage data and applications on servers that can be managed, maintained and updated centrally.

These reasons indicate the importance of the Web in data storage and manipulation. The Web-enabled data access has many significant features, such as:

·     The first

·     The second

·     The emerging third

·     HTML publishing

·     Helper applications

·     Plug-ins

·     Server-centric components

·     Java and active-x applications

The primary key in the decision making process is the amount of data collected and how well this data is interpreted. Nowadays, Managers aren’t satisfied by getting direct answers to their direct questions, Instead due to the market growth and increase of clients their questions became more complicated. Questions are like‖ How much profit from selling our products at our different centers per month‖. A complicated question like this isn’t as simple to be answered directly; it needs analysis to three fields in order to obtain an answer.

The Decision making processes

1.     Identify information about the problem

2.     Analyze the problem

3.     Collect and evaluate the information, and define alternative solutions.

The decision making process exists in the different levels of an organization. The speed and the

simplicity of gathering data and the ability to convert this data into information is the main element in the decision process. That’s why the term Business Intelligence has evolved.

Business Intelligence

As mentioned Earlier, business Intelligence is concerned with gathering the data and converting this data into information, so as to use a better decision. The better the data is gathered and how well it is interpreted as information is one of the most important elements in a successful business.

Elements of Business Intelligence

There are three main Components in Business Intelligence

Data Warehouse: it is a collection of data to support the management decisions making. It revolves around the major subjects of the business to support the management.

OLAP: is used to generate complex queries of multidimensional collection of data from the data warehouse.

Data Mining: consists of various techniques that explore and bring complex relationships in very large sets.

In the next figure the relation between the three components are represented.