Thanks to everyone who attended my sessions “What exactly is Business Intelligence?” and “Building an Effective Data Warehouse Architecture” at the PASS SQL Saturday in Chicago.

Here are the PowerPoint presentation: What exactly is Business Intelligence? and Building an Effective Data Warehouse Architecture.

What exactly is Business Intelligence?

BI is the “Gathering of data from multiple sources to present it in a way that allows executives to make better business decisions”. I will describe in more detail exactly what BI is, what encompasses the Microsoft BI stack, why it is so popular, and why a BI career pays so much. I will review specific examples from previous projects of mine that show the benefits of BI and its huge return-on-investment. I’ll go into detail on the components of a BI solution, and I will discuss key concepts for successfully implementing BI in your organization.

Building an Effective Data Warehouse Architecture

You’re a DBA and your boss asks you to determine if a data warehouse would help the company. So many questions pop into your head: Why use a data warehouse? What is the best methodology to use when creating a data warehouse? Should I use a normalized or dimensional approach? What is the difference between the Kimball and Inmon methodologies? Does the new Tabular model in SQL Server 2012 change things? What is the difference between a data warehouse and a data mart? Is there any hardware I can purchase that is optimized for a data warehouse? What if I have a ton of data? During this session James will help you to answer these questions so your response to your boss will provoke amazement and lead to a big raise. Or at least help to lead you down the correct path!