Life is filled with decisions. Should we look for a job or go back to school; should we enroll our kids to French Immersion Programs or English class; should we contribute all our saving to mortgage or spending it for a relaxed Caribbean holiday? Sometime, the choice we make ca have life-changing consequences. Even seemingly trivial decisions can have big consequences down the road. It just likes the old words - the key to success in life is to make good choices!!!

 

Good decision making is as important in the working world as it is in our life. Everyday a number of decisions must be made that determine the direction and efficiency of the organizations we work for. Decisions are made affecting cost, sales and margins. Just as our personal life, the key to organization success is making good choices. The important thing for an effective decision making is to set specific, measurable goals. Once these goals have been set the objective is to get accurate, useful information to the appropriate decisions makers. Having the foundation and feedback information available at the appropriate time is extremely important. The questions become how does an organization go about obtaining and distributing this information? Using Business intelligence Solution becomes the answer. (Business Intelligence is the delivery of accurate, useful information to the appropriate decision makers within the necessary timeframe to support effective decision making.)

 

Fortunately, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 / 2012 provides tools to support all aspects of business intelligent:

 

SSIS (integration services) enable us to build a high performance data integration solution. We can build extract, transform, and load (ETL) packages to update data warehouse, interact with external processes, clean and mine data, process analytic objects and perform administrative tasks.

 

SSAS (Analysis Services) provides numerous online analytical processing (OLAP) features such as Key Performance Indicators (KPI), multidimensional expression (MDS) queries and scripts and Unified Dimensional Model (UDM) enable us to slice, dice and summarize information, so it can be presented a meaningful manner. Data mining permits us to find and present patterns and behavior predictors, which might not be found in the data.

 

SSRS (Reporting Services) is a server based reporting platform that enable us to create and manage tabular, matrix, graphical and free form reports that contain data from relational and multidimensional data source. It is a powerful tool to present business data in effective way (on demand and by subscriptions) and delivery of this information to decision makers throughout the entire organization. Allow viewing and managing over a world wide web base connection makes reporting services more flexible to deploy, manage and integrated with different type applications.

 

As a candidate focusing on BI for SQL Server 2008 / 2012 training, you may find following information from the current BI Course:

 

o   What is SSRS, SSRS Architecture

o   Design SSRS Solution

o   Develop SSRS Solution

§ Access Data

·         Data Source

·         Data Set

§ Display Data

·         Table

o   Fields

o   Aggregated expression

·         Group

·         Format

§ Report Items

·         Data Region

·         Independent Item

§ Parameters, Filters and Sort

·         Create Parameters, filters and orders

·         Create dynamic Parameters

§ Navigation

·         Dynamic Visibility

·         Drill down report

·         Document map

·         Actions

o   Hyperlink

o   Drill-through Link

o   Book Mark Line

§ Implement Report Layout

§ Implement Report Rendering Formats

§ Subscriptions

·         On demand

·         Data driven subscriptions

§ Report Model

§ Report builder

o   Test SSRS Solution

o   Integrate SSRS with Customer Application

o   Deploy And Configure SSRS Solution

§ Build Report

§ Publish Report

§ Execute Report

§ Configure Cached Instance

§ Create Snapshot and Report History

§ Administering Security

§ Administering Reporting Services

·         Configuration files

·         Performance

·         Database Storage

·         Disk Space

·         Backup Restore

o   Manage SSRS Solution

 

o   What is Integration Services

o   Integration Services Architecture

o   SSIS Tools and Utilities

o   Develop SSIS Solution

§ Create SSIS Solution

§ Project

§ Connections and Connection Manager

§ Control Flow

§ Data Flow

§ Implement Logging

§ Implement Event Handler

§ Implement Variable

·         System Variable

·         User Variable

§ Debug SSIS package

§ Build SSIS solution

§ Running SSIS Solution

§ Deploy SSIS Solution

§ Manage SSIS Solution

 

o   What is Analysis Services

o   Analysis Services Architecture

o   SSAS Tools and Utilities

o   Develop SSAS Solution

§ Create SSAS Solution

§ Project

§ Manage Connections

§ Cube

§ Dimensions, Attribute, Hierarchy

§ Measures, Measure Group

§ Introduction of MDX

§ Implement KPI

§ Implement Actions

§ Implement Perspectives

§ Implement Translations

§ Introduction of Data Mining

o   Deploy SSAS

o   Manage SSAS

§ Configuration

§ Security

§ Monitor

 

Above course outline will have corresponding lab description.