Business intelligence (BI) is an umbrella term that refers to a variety of software applications used to analyze an organization’s raw data. BI as a discipline is made up of several related activities including data mining, online analytical processing, querying and reporting. Analytics is the discovery and communication of meaningful patterns in data. This blog will look at a few areas of BI that will include data mining and reporting, as well as talk about using analytics to find the answers you need to make better business decisions.
Data Mining
Data Mining is an analytic process designed to explore data. Companies of all sizes continuously collect data, often times in very large amounts, in order to solve complex business problems. Data collection can range in purpose from finding out the types of soda your customers like to drink to tracking genome patterns. To process these large amounts of data quickly takes a lot of processing power, and therefore, a system such as Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR) is often needed to accomplish this. AWS EMR can handle most use cases from log analysis to bioinformatics, which are key when collecting data, but AWS EMR can only report on data that is collected, so make sure the collected data is accurate and complete.
Reporting
Reporting accurate and complete data is essential for good BI. Tools like Splunk’s Hunk and Hive work very well with AWS EMR for modeling, reporting, and analyzing data. Hive is business intelligence software used for reporting meaningful patterns in the data, while Hunk helps interactively review logs with real-time alerts. Using the correct tools is the difference between data no one can use and data that provides meaningful BI.
Why do we collect all this data? To find answers of course! Finding answers in your data, from marketing data to application debugging, is why we collect the data in the first place. AWS EMR is great for processing all that data with the right tools reporting on that data. But more than knowing just what happened, we need to find out how it happened. Interactive queries on the data are required to drill down and find the root causes or customer trends. Tools like Impala and Tableau work great with AWS EMR for these needs.
Business Intelligence and Analytics boils down to collecting accurate and complete data. That includes having a system that can process that data, having the ability to report on that data in a meaningful way, and using that data to find answers. By provisioning the storage, computation and database services you need to collect big data into the cloud, we can help you manage big data, BI and analytics while reducing costs, increasing speed of innovation, and providing high availability and durability so you can focus on making sense of your data and using it to make better business decisions. Learn more about our BI and Analytics Solutions here.
-Brent Anderson, Senior Cloud Engineer
