Looking Ahead

This chapter has taken a long and leisurely detour from Microsoft Access to discuss business intelligence, with an eye toward explaining its relevance to Access and data analysis. The main thrust of our argument is that business intelligence can be seen as a natural extension of the data analysis process. To the many varied techniques and goals of data analysis, business intelligence adds a certain sense of structure to the pursuit.

We began the chapter with an exploration of data warehouses, a necessary precursor to business intelligence software. We emphasized that there are two types of data warehouses: relational databases and multidimensional cubes. For data warehouses built as relational databases, there are two variants: those that use a normalized structure and those that rely on a dimensional model. The dimensional model is seen as increasingly relevant, as it nicely complements the capabilities of BI software. We also discussed some of the advantages of multidimensional cubes over relational databases.