Introduction
Reporting and analysis applications are becoming more important in today's
business applications. Queries that aggregate over a large portion of the data
in a relational database slow down this database. Therefore, OLAP (OnLine
Analytical Processing) cubes have been invented to provide performant
aggregation querying over large amounts of data. Usually, not all the data needed
for analysis or reporting is in the right format on the right location,
Therefore, it is common to have an integration phase before the actual analysis
or reporting phase to prepare the data. In this course, you get an overview of
the features of the server side Business Intelligence tools that Microsoft
ships with SQL Server 2008: Integration Services, Analysis Services and
Reporting Services. Besides these, we briefly discuss how to build your own
client applications on top of these services.
This course focuses mainly on how to get started with the three BI
server-side Microsoft products. It doesn't discuss administration nor
maintenance. For an in-depth course on Integration Services, we refer to course
USQ5IS, for Analysis Services we refer to course USQ5AS and for Reporting
Services we refer to USQ5RS
At Course
Completion
Student will be able to extract, transform and load data with Integration
Services, create and browse Analysis Services cubes and data mining models,
build reports on Reporting Services using the Report Builder as well as the
Report Designer against relational data as well as OLAP cubes. They will have
an understanding of how clients can be built to access this data.
Prerequisites
Students taking this course should have a basic knowledge of the SQL query
language. For the session on building client-side applications, a passive
understanding of the VB.NET or C# programming language is required.
The course materials, lectures, and
activities are in English. To benefit fully from the instruction, students need
an understanding of the English language and completion of the prerequisites.
Course Outline
Module 1:
Introduction
- The
need for Business Intelligence
- Business Intelligence in SQL Server
- Business
Intelligence Development Studio
Module 2:
Designing IS Control flows
- Overview
of tasks
- Precedence
constraints
- Containers
and loops
Module 3:
Designing IS Data Flow
- Data
Sources
- Data
Transformations
- Data
Destinations
Module 4: Loading
the relational data in AS
- Data
Sources and Impersonation
- Data
Source Views
- Exploring
the data
Module 5:
Building and deploying basic cubes
- The
auto build wizard
- Inspecting
the meta-data
- Deploying
cubes
- Processing
cubes
Module 6:
Browsing the data
- Browsing
from within Visual Studio
- Browsing
from within Management Studio
Module 7:
Processing Cubes and Dimensions
- Different
types of processing
- Processing
dimensions
- Processing
cubes
Module 8:
Advanced Cube Features
- Translations
- Key
Performance Indicators
- Actions
- Perspectives
Module 9: Data
Mining Introduction
- Why
haystacks are hard to find
- Data
mining skills
- Different
types of data mining
Module 10:
Creating data mining models
- Create
Mining Structure
- Create
multiple mining models
- Deploy
and process a model
- Browsing
and interpreting mining models
- Testing
the quality of mining models
Module 11:
Introduction to Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services
- Overview
of Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services
- Tour of
Reporting Services
- Overview
of Reporting Services Architecture
Module 12: Authoring Basic
Reports
- Creating
a Basic Table Report
- Formatting
Report Pages
- Calculating
Values
Module 13:
Advanced Reporting options
- Multi-select parameters
- Interactive
column sorting
- Floating
headers
- Using
the OLAP query builder
Module 14: Ad hoc
queries with Report Builder
- Introducing
Report Builder
- Create
Report Builder reports
Appendix: Client
side Business Intelligence
- Rendering reports from URLs and web services
- Accessing Cubes and Data Mining models with ADOMD.NET
- Embedding reports in .Net client applications
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