Business Intelligence (BI) systems were originally targeted primarily at large enterprises with tons of data. As BI technology improved, it started to become more accessible to small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), who started using BI systems to answer many of the same business questions as their larger, enterprise cousins. After all, business is business: Whether … Continue reading The Differences Between BI for Enterprises and SMBs
Tag Archives: Business Intelligence
Helpful SharePoint BI Links to Blogs and Articles
This blog post is a collection of links to articles and documentation that has been valuable to me as I worked my way through understanding and implementing and using the BI stack with SharePoint. Hopefully this will save someone some time by having all these links in one spot. Enjoy! Comparing Tabular and Multidimensional Solutions … Continue reading Helpful SharePoint BI Links to Blogs and Articles
How to install Performance Point Dashboard Designer in SharePoint
In this blog post I will install Performance Point Dashboard Designer from the Business Intelligence Center Site Template in SharePoint 2010. I have created a new site collection with the BI Center Template as the top level site and I am logged in as the Site Collection Administrator. Activate the correct area of the Home … Continue reading How to install Performance Point Dashboard Designer in SharePoint
Benefits in Migrating Your BI Solution to a Newer Version of SQL Server
In my experience, SQL Server is often one of the most least-upgraded components in an enterprise. You may think your company will never get off of Windows XP, but odds are you have several versions of SQL Server floating around, with no plans to upgrade them. After all, it’s often easier just to leave existing … Continue reading Benefits in Migrating Your BI Solution to a Newer Version of SQL Server
Three Tips on Choosing the Hardware for Your BI Solution
Many small- and medium-sized businesses choose to go with Business Intelligence (BI) solutions that are at least partly pre-built. That means that the biggest single factor in the system’s performance – the database schema – is often already decided and can’t readily be changed. The benefit of that approach is that you’re not paying for … Continue reading Three Tips on Choosing the Hardware for Your BI Solution
Are BI Solutions Compatible with Virtualization?
As more and more small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMBs) investigate and adopt Business Intelligence (BI) solutions, one question eventually gets asked: Can we virtualize this thing? Businesses are increasingly leveraging virtualization to reduce the number of physical servers they have to maintain, to provide better availability, to enable fault tolerance and disaster recovery, and much more. BI … Continue reading Are BI Solutions Compatible with Virtualization?
Using SQL Server Analysis Services for poorly-performing BI Systems
No matter how well-designed and –build a business intelligence (BI) system is, it’s always possible that your workload will exceed its capabilities, and you’ll end up being dissatisfied with its performance. In those cases, what can you do? Your options depend a lot on the underlying database and analysis engine; for this article, we’ll assume … Continue reading Using SQL Server Analysis Services for poorly-performing BI Systems
Three Ways to Scale Your Existing BI Business Intelligence System
Business Intelligence (BI) systems can take a lot of computing horsepower, and most organizations try to deploy as much horsepower as possible when they implement a BI solution. Unfortunately, BI is one of those things that makes its users want more. More reports. More dashboards. More data. And all that “more” means you’ll eventually need … Continue reading Three Ways to Scale Your Existing BI Business Intelligence System
Data Warehouse or Business Intelligence BI Solution – or Both?
I’ve recently been working with a number of small- and medium-sized businesses that are preparing to jump aboard the decision support bandwagon. Several of them have been asking me questions that reveal the enormous amount of confusion in the decision support industry, such as, “do we need a data warehouse, or should we buy a … Continue reading Data Warehouse or Business Intelligence BI Solution – or Both?
Top 5 Selection Criteria for Packaged BI Systems
Small- to Medium-Sized Businesses (SMBs) enjoy a growing marketplace for packaged, SMB-focused business intelligence (BI) solutions. From all-in-one solutions that you host on your own server to Software as a Service (SaaS) cloud-based solutions that you just sign up for, the options grow every day. The lessons that huge enterprises have learned from BI over … Continue reading Top 5 Selection Criteria for Packaged BI Systems