business intelligence tool

How to work on repository

In what sense? Do you want to report/query information in a repository? It depends on the BI tool you are interested in. Most have utilities for reporting and extracting, although they usually are fairly simplistic. If the repository is a relational database, you can always try to reverse engineer it. Everyone is different, so you need to be specific about which tool and what you want to do.

I am using OBIEE tool to generate reports from the data in data warehouse.I want to know about ETL process and how it works

The last I saw of OBIEE, it was using Informatica as its ETL tool... I believe that is still the case. ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) tools are used, as the name suggests, to extract data from source operational systems, transform the data (assign keys, apply business rules, restructure the model, etc...) and load it into the data warehouse. The Informatica repository is a relational database (most likely Oracle in your case) which contains the metadata it uses to execute the mappings defined using the Informatica toolset. The repository schema is proprietary and complex. There are various tech sites and blogs that provide some information about the schema. I suggest you do a web search if you need to find specific information about it.

These were are all Sales Intelligence Tools and Data warehouses or Financial Intelligence Tools or Data warehouses. Well understood paradigms, tools and evolved set of capabilities.

However, Business Processes and Operational Intelligence tools are very much lacking, not in conceptualization or technical capabilities.

It is in conceptualizing what is needed in Business Intelligence solutions in order to be able to do a good job at Process Improvement and what kinds of information do you need to be collecting in Business Intelligence tools and Data Warehousing solutions so that they can be useful for Process Improvement!

The whole idea of collecting Sales Intelligence is to gain insights into the products or services you are selling, who you are selling to and who is interested in buying, sales performance of your sales force and others.

The idea of Financial Intelligence is to gain insights into where you are getting your revenues from, how you are managing your cash, collections and disbursements, where you are spending your money, and others.

When it comes to Process or Operational Intelligence, the problem becomes slightly different. Post mortem, rear view mirror kind of information is not very useful. Knowing that you screwed up a patient's surgery experience or the Automobile Insurance Claim, after the fact is not as useful as getting real-time information as and when it is happening and you have a chance to set things right.

The other is also that business processes are hardly confined to any one corporation or enterprise any more. The entire supply chain from Order to Manufacture to Shipping to Cash to PostSales Support are all handled by more than one organization, many of them outsourced to third parties.

The customer experience now is in the hands of many different parties but as far as the customer is concerned they are dealing with XYZ Insurance or Dell Computers when they buy a PC and expect it to be shipped to them as promised. Any delays in the chain by any party affects the main business that the customer thinks he/she is dealing with.

You need to have a clear idea of how the process is flowing. Something like a Visio flow diagram that clearly shows handoffs, expected turnaround times from each of the parties involved in the chain. In addition, the Business Intelligence solutions need to capture and report on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that are crucial for the execution of business processes in slice and dice report formats like Sales and Financial Intelligence solutions provide.

So you need to capture Business Process Flow as well as have the traditional Data Warehousing and analysis capabilities that exist currently.

Thus we see that traditional Business Intelligence solutions have a ways to go before hey address effectively, BI applications in the area of Process Improvement!
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Data entry india

SAS, BO and Micro strategy are the ones I heard most. Don't really know how Microsoft BI tool is doing in the market... what do they call it? I am thinking there may be a proper name of this one...

bpwfoundation.org

I wonder that this question hasn't already been asked. Google only has very few results for me that don't show a high quality tool
What are some Open Source (also free is ok) solutions for Data Warehouses and more specifically Business Intelligence Tools? What are your experiences with them. I have had a course in my masters programm and we worked with MS Business Intelligence and MSSQL as Data Warehouse storage. Now I want to get more into this topic with tools that are "open".
Are there any compareable tools for Business Intelligence (mostly database independent) and do you have any experience with them?
edit With Marian's comment to Stephanie's answer, I see that I have formulated the question wrong. I am aware that DWH are just "reporting-optimized" databases, Stephanie's explanation was very clear on that. I am more interessted how to get the data into such optimised forms with WHAT kind of BI software/tools/other techniques.

I am more interessted how to get the data into such optimised forms with WHAT kind of BI software/tools/other techniques.

'Business Intelligence Tools' refers to the front end... reporting, OLAP, dashboards, etc... Moving and restructuring the data is a back end function handled with ETL/ELT tools and/or coding in procedural SQL or a programming language.