Chapter 6. Achieving Business Insight by Integrating Relational and Multi-dimensional Data

by Ross Sharman and Juliana Button

To establish competitive differentiation, organizations across the globe face similar issues—the need to simultaneously address situational questions ("What"), and forward-looking questions ("How"), as part of their everyday organizational reporting and planning needs. Business Intelligence (BI) solutions can help with the "What" analysis to provide past and present views of data and transactional reporting, whereas multi-dimensional Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) tools excel at "How" analysis, providing modeling and forecasting capabilities to determine how particular behavior will impact upon results. In the past, distinct BI solutions have addressed what really should be seen as a seamless BI continuum, as illustrated in the following figure: